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FROM 

BENJ. B. EDMANDS, 

PROVIDENCE, R. I. 
TRUSTEE ESTATE OF A. M. WILLIAMS. 

PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/memorialofalfredOOwill 



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BOOKS BY ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 



The Poets and Poetry op Ireland. 
With Historical and Critical Essay 
and Note. 12mo. 

Sam. Houston and the War op In- 
dependence in Texas. 8vo. 

Studies in Folk-Songs and Popolar 
Poetry. 12mo. 




ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 



QYlemoriaP 



ALFRED MASON WILLIAMS 



BORN OCTOBER 23, 1840 
DIED MARCH 9, 1896 



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Copyright, 1898 

BY 

PRESTON & ROUNDS CO. 
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TRESS OF 

E. L. FREEMAN & SONS, 

PROVIDENCE, R. I. 






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CONTENTS. 



Alfred M. Williams, by Riciiard S. Howland, 

FIRST VISIT. 

I. The Island of Nevis 35 

II. Port of Spain 44 

SECOND VISIT. 

III. St. Kitts 57 

IV. St. Eustatius 69 

V. An Island Eyrie 82 

VI. Nevis 105 

VII. San Martin 118 

VIII. St. Barts 130 

IX. Rioting in St. Kitts 141 

X. Montserrat 151 

A Lover's Pain 165 

To C. A. W 166 



We have most gratefully to acknowledge the kind- 
ness of Mr. Howland, whose labor of love appears 
in the very appreciative life sketch. We also thank- 
fully acknowledge the kindness of the Providence 
Journal Company for the privilege of printing these 
letters of Mr. Williams and the verses of M. M. T. 
which first appeared in their columns. 



ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 



Is thft the end— a lamp blown out forever ? 

That matchless memory, wit and wisdom fled ? 
That wondrous miud, that heart of high endeavor — 

Are all these things as naught, now he is dead ? 

Yet 'tis the kindly heart we most are mourning. 
The helping hand that ever beckoned higher, 

The lofty soul, the low pretensions scorning, 
The voice that bade to nobler deeds aspire. 

No faithful friend a farewell uttered o'er him. 

Was this an end befitting such as he ? 
Was it to this poor goal his journeys bore him, 

A lonely island in a distant sea ? 

Yet as in death, in life so walked he lonely, 
Drew with infrequent hand the veil apart 

And showed where sorrow sat with the silent 
And inner sanctuary of his heart. 

From words of bard and sage he fain would borrow 
Balm for the wounds of unforgetting pain — 

The pen his shield from all-intrusive sorrow, 
So should his loss become another's gain. 

Could he but tell to us this one last story, 
That lonely journey to the unknown land ! 

Was it through paths of pain, or gates of glory ? 
Alas, the idle pen, the quiet hand ! 



X ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

Somewhere doth genial fellowship await him, 
Bard, poet, wit and scholar gone before, 

A goodly company, shall stand to greet him, 
In hearty welcome on the untrod shore. 

What matters it that far across the ocean 

The hands of strangers laid him down to rest ? 
The sea-waves chant his dirge with ceaseless motion. 
And wild birds sing above his quiet breast ? 

Far forth in space shall his free soul be straying, 
With those he loved and lost long years ago, 

And in deep draughts of peace his heart-thirst staying, 
Shall find the joy that he had missed below. 

M. M. T. 



ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

A BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH. 

BY RICHARD S. HOWL AND. 



Alfred Mason Williams was born on a farm near 
Taunton, October 28d, in the year 1840. He came of 
one of the best known New England families, and 
inherited that dogged determination of his ancestors 
which enabled them and him to overcome such 
obstacles in their path as would have caused fainter 
hearts to turn aside. The soil about Taunton is not 
a kindly one. Those who wring an existence from 
its barrenness must work early and late and be 
satisfied with meagre returns. This struggle with 
nature is not a hopeless one, however, and it develops 
a hardy man who can easily hold his own against 
those growing up in more luxurious surroundings. 
In the 40's and 50's the public school system of 
Massachusetts had not attained a very wide develop- 
ment. Even then it was good enough, however, to 



2 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

furnish every scholar with the rudiments of learning. 
Young- Williams was able to supplement his early 
studies by a few terms at the Bristol Academy, an 
institution perfectly competent to fit young men for 
any of the New England colleges. In 1886, when 
the farmer's boy was 16 years old, he entered Brown 
University. That he could spare the time to prepare 
himself at this age, and that he had the ambition to 
obtain the best education within the reach of anyone, 
showed that his native farm afforded its tillers much 
more than food and clothing. 

He was only able to remain two years in the Rhode 
Island college. At the end of that time an inherent 
weakness of his eyes began to show itself, and by his 
physician's advice he was obliged to give up the life 
of a student, which he so much preferred, and return 
to agricultural pursuits. The university was amply 
satisfied a few years later that he had made up the 
prescribed studies of his course, and gave him the 
full degree. Although the doctor had forbidden him 
to use his eyes in reading, to the extent demanded by 
a college course, he was able during the next four 
years of outdoor labor to find many hours of leisure 
in which he could avail himself of the goodly supply 
of books to be found in any Massachusetts com- 
munity of the size of Taunton. His education had 
been carried beyond the average when he left Brown, 
and he knew perfectly well how to distinguish between 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 6 

solid literature and ephemeral trash. It cannot be 
said that in these four years he had laid up as good 
a stock of knowledge as he might have done by 
continuing his college course, but probably his ac- 
quaintance with English literature was much wider 
at the end of this time than that of any of his former 
classmates. 

When the war of the rebellion broke out, our 
farmer was busy enough with his routine work on 
the farm and his books, but for a young man of 22 
at such stirring times it was natural enough that he 
should heed the call of his country and enter the 
army. He enlisted as private, in the spring of 1862, 
in the Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, 
for a nine months' term of service. Before he was 
discharged from the army, at the expiration of his 
time, it was his destiny to go through one of the 
severest campaigns of the entire war. Little did any 
one expect when these raw recruits from southeastern 
Massachusetts were mustered-in, armed, and ecpiipped 
at Readville, that they were to go through an ex- 
perience which would have tried the discipline of the 
most seasoned veterans, or be called upon to face with 
undaunted courage, suffering and death in every 
form. The regiment was taken on board transports 
in New York to proceed to New Orleans, where they 
were to join the great army gathering to take posses- 
sion of the lower portion of the Mississippi river. 



•1 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

The voyage to the Crescent City occupied six weeks, 
and was ever memorable to the men who enjoyed the 
delightful trip. There was plenty of room on the 
vessel, good food and fine weather. This was Mr. 
Williams' first experience on the ocean, and he ever 
remembered it with gratitude. He always knew from 
this time forward where he could best find repose, 
and many voyages were undertaken by him after- 
wards for this express purpose. 

Promptly on arrival at New Orleans, the regiment 
was marched off to join the forces moving on Port 
Hudson. The object of the campaign was to help 
General Grant free the Mississippi from all obstruc- 
tions, and thus cut the Confederate States in two. At 
first the regiment was employed in minor expeditions 
until the commanding general began to collect his 
forces at Brasher, in the latter part of February. 

Here many delays occurred, and it was the 10th of 
April before General Banks began to move. He had 
altogether some 30,000 men scattered about his 
department, but half of them were volunteers, like 
the Fourth Massachusetts, whose terms of enlistment 
would soon expire. He marched against the Con- 
federates with nearly 15,000 men, and, with the help 
of the gunboats, was entirely successful in driving 
the rebels from one position after another, until, on 
the 6th of May, he captured Alexandria. The Con- 
federates lost 2,000 men and 20 pieces of artillery in 



A BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 

this brief campaign, and retreated as fast as possible 
to Shreveport. A week later Banks left Alexandria 
for Port Hudson, and soon invested that stronghold. 
Deceived by false reports of the weakness of the 
Confederates, he made a disastrous assault on the 
place on the 27th of May. For ten hours the Union 
forces struggled bravely against the earthworks of 
the enemy. Occasionally they would gain the para- 
pet only to be beaten back with dreadful losses. 
Close by the Massachusetts men the two colored regi- 
ments fought, and won the admiration of all who 
watched them by their persistent courage. It was a 
revelation to the white soldiers as well as to the 
whole north that these blacks could die so bravely. 
At the end of the day Banks sounded the recall and 
asked for a truce, to bury three hundred dead and 
take fifteen hundred wounded to the rear. Mr. Wil- 
liams was in the thick of this fighting but, was not 
hurt, although his company lost its captain and 
more than its share of killed and wounded. Then 
for two weeks the army worked, digging trenches 
and constructing earthworks. The heat was intense, 
and malarial fever claimed nearly half the force. On 
the 11th of June Banks decided that he must make 
another assault or lose his entire army by sickness 
in the trenches. This second attempt failed rather 
less disastrously than the first, as far as losses in 
killed and wounded went, but it cost the enfeebled 
i* 



6 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

forces 750 men and left the besiegers in a forlorn 
condition. If the rebels had been able to make a 
vigorous sally, or if any reinforcements could have 
been sent to them, the complete destruction of the 
Union army would have resulted. General Grant 
was, however, so well satisfied with the situation 
that he urged Banks to send him two or three regi- 
ments to assist in the capture of Vicksburg. This 
was not possible. It was all the latter could do to 
keep a force in his trenches sufficient to remind the 
rebels that it would be impossible for them to march 
out without danger. For the next three weeks there 
was only desultory fighting kept up. Men would 
crawl out of bed, in the intervals of their malarial 
fever, to fire a few shots at the enemy before the 
chills came on again so severely that they could not 
hold a musket. It was the same story of the uncon- 
querable pluck of the volunteer soldiers of the North 
overcoming the resistance of the South and atoning 
for the blunders of generals ignorant of the art of 
war. It was during this period that Mr. Williams 
found time to write letters to the New York Tribune 
and other newspapers. Then he found that he could 
describe the scenes about him in a graphic manner, 
and that the success of his letters was the opening 
of his life's career to him. He never faltered in his 
determination to make journalism his profession 
when he saw that he could write in such a way that 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. t 

people would enjoy his pen pictures. The scenes 
about him were well calculated to awaken his capac- 
ities. He was watching others suffering' from wounds 
and disease while himself almost a physical wreck 
from the inroads of the fever. Under the circum- 
stances it seemed almost impossible to fill out many 
pages, even with so much material lying about him, 
but he made the great effort necessary, and was 
repaid a hundredfold in after life for this exhibition 
of his pluck. So the long, hot days of June dragged 
on, accompanied by the intense heat of a Louisiana 
summer. There was constant skirmishing with the 
enemy, with the resultant casualties. The hospitals 
were filling up rapidly as the ranks were depleted. 
Miasmas steamed up from the newly dug trenches, 
rendering any escape from the fever germs impos- 
sible. The strongest constitutions succumbed to the 
contagion, and it might be truly said that there was 
not a man left in the Fourth Massachusetts who was 
capable of doing an ordinary day's work. In addi- 
tion to this their time of enlistment had then expired, 
and they were kept at the front simply because it 
was physically impossible to get them away. As the 
weeks dragged by, however, it was just as bad, or 
worse, for the small army of rebels defending the 
stronghold. They were hoping for relief which 
never came ; they were rapidly using up their stores, 
and the ravages of disease were just as virulent with 



S ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

them as with their foes. Altogether it was a situa- 
tion appealing to the imagination of one capable of 
describing it in graphic terms. The story was often 
told in after years with many variations, from differ- 
ent standpoints, but there was no witness on the spot 
who ever portrayed it in clearer colors. 

One morning, early in July, a great cheering broke 
out in the trenches of the Union men, where all had 
been so cheerless for so many weeks. At first the 
rebels supposed that reinforcements had arrived and 
that the final assault would begin. Soon, however, 
a flag of truce appeared, and the rebel general was 
informed that Pemberton had surrendered to Grant 
at Vicksburg. General Banks asked his brave oppo- 
nent to give up the now useless struggle, and spare 
any further sacrifice of lives on each side. After 
much parleying this was finally agreed upon, and 
the last obstruction to the free navigation of the 
great river from St. Louis to the sea was removed. 
The campaign was now over, and the Fourth Massa- 
chusetts was at once relieved fr,om further service. 
It was transported by steamer up the river and 
reached home in August, presenting a sad spectacle 
of weary and broken down men. Few of the soldiers 
were able to re-enlist, while young Williams required 
several months of rest before he could resume labor 
at any avocation. 

As soon as he was able to be about ag'ain, he sought 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 9 

and obtained a position on the Taunton Gazette, begin- 
ning at the bottom of the ladder and steadily work- 
ing his way up through every position on the paper. 
Journalism, as then existing in the smaller cities of 
New England, did not hold out very strong financial 
inducements to its reporters or editors, but it did give 
this young man a livelihood, and also afforded him 
the practice he desired in the use of his pen. He 
was often called upon to write up the robbery of a 
lien roost, or a vehicular catastrophe caused by the 
breaking of an antiquated harness, but he was not 
■denied the privilege of writing serious editorial para- 
graphs or taking part in the discussion of important 
local topics. Whatever his., assignment, he was in- 
terested in doing well the work before him, and 
believed that better opportunities would soon be 
presented. Two years passed before the chance he 
longed for was sent his way, but when it did come it 
was more than he could have anticipated in his most 
ambitious dreams. 

Horace Greely, the editor of the New York Tribune, 
had come out of the civil war with perhaps as high a 
reputation as anyone who had not been immediately 
connected with its operations in an official capacity. 
He thought himself, therefore, fully justified in aspir- 
ing to the presidency, and, being practically certain 
that he could not obtain the Republican nomination, 
he turned his attention toward making himself solid 



10 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

Avitli the Irish voters of New York. Fenianisni was 
then attracting much attention, and while the veteran 
journalist was not in the least deceived by the hope- 
lessness of the effort on the part of the Irish to throw 
off the rule of England, he thought it would be a 
good stroke of policy to send a special correspondent 
across the water to write up the actual condition of 
affairs in the Emerald Isle. Remembering the good 
work of the young soldier from Taunton in the recent 
war, he made him an offer, which was eagerly accepted, 
and early in October, 1865, Mr. Williams set sail for 
Cork. Fortune was most kind to him in instigating 
the over zealous police at Queenstown to arrest him 
as soon as he landed, on account of his smart military 
bearing and the discovery of a revolver in his valise. 
It was brought out at the preliminary hearing that 
the authorities had been warned that officers of the 
American army were hastening to Ireland in small 
groups and singly, for the purpose of taking command 
of the insurrectionists. The case against the war cor- 
respondent was so clear that he was at once sent to 
jail, and there languished for seven days. He was 
then released with a martyr's crown upon his brow 
guaranteeing him a warm reception wherever he went 
among the people. His first letter to the Tribune was 
dated November 1st, and was followed at frequent 
intervals by contributions to the Boston Journal, 
Post, Pilot, Saturday Press and Taunton Gazette. He 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 11 

remained two weeks in Cork, which he described in 
detail, visiting the poorest quarters, and bringing out 
the want and misery of the wretched inhabitants. 
From there he proceeded to Tipperary, next to Water- 
ford, Upper Kilmac, Glenmore, Kilkenny, and reached 
Dublin by the middle of December. From the capital 
he made trips to different points of interest all over 
the island. His last letter was dated the 19th of 
January, and he reached Taunton on his return by 
the 9th of February. He had thus enjoyed fully three 
months of travel in this most distressful country, 
and accumulated a store of material which proved of 
the greatest value to him in all his after life. He 
wrote twenty long letters in that time, which are pre- 
served in his scrap book, and refers in a note to two 
others. He pretty thoroughly plucked the heart out 
of Fenianism, and well revealed the hopelessness of 
any insurrection against the overwhelming power of 
England. The misery of the peasantry won his 
warmest sympathy, and caused him to rebuke in no 
mincing language the tyranny of the " foreigners " 
who seemed to take delight in inflicting needless 
sufferings upon a downtrodden race. It was a great 
change from chronicling the daily events in a small 
community like Taunton to be investigating the con- 
dition of the unhappy Celts who occupied the soil of 
Ireland, but it was not too great a labor for Mr. 
Williams' active mind. He mixed with every class 



12 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

of the people, and studied his subject thoroughly,, 
until he was able to make a report which has stood 
the test of time. He found that the emigration of 
the peasantry would prove to be the true relief for the 
crowded condition of the labor market, and that the 
land would be largely turned into pasture ground for 
cattle. In later years, when Mr. Gladstone staked 
and lost his power on his Home Rule measure, no one 
in this country better understood the merits and 
demerits of that agitation than Mr. Williams. It was 
here also that the study of folk lore was begun and 
the foundation of two books laid. Mr. Williams 
found the direct descendants of the old bards travel- 
ling about from one village to another, earning a 
scant livelihood by crude renderings of songs and 
ballads. It occurred to him at once that by collect- 
ing these recitations, and comparing them with the 
earlier poems of the country, he could trace the 
changes which had been wrought by the successive 
generations. This is the science of folk lore as since 
developed, and its pursuit has attracted the attention 
of many of the brightest litterateurs. Mr. Williams 
was fortunate in having two opportunities subse- 
quently to become somewhat acquainted with the 
myths of the red Indians of the west, and with those 
of the negroes of the Antilles. His enthusiasm in 
the pursuit of this knowledge finally cost him his 
life. He often declared, and those who knew him 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 13 

best recognized trie fact, that his talent lay in the 
studies of places and peoples, and not in the contro- 
versies of editorial work. Had he possessed private 
means at thirty, such as came to him at fifty, he 
would have turned his entire thought to just such 
work as he was engaged in during those three happy 
months passed in Ireland. His social studies of the 
poor all over the world would have been a note- 
worthy contribution to literature, had he ever been 
given more extended opportunities to make them. 
He never could forget that " he was perched above 
such a crowded swarm of poverty and misery, hunger, 
and disease, as is packed in noisome hives like a 
death's head beneath a grinning mask." He several 
times took occasion afterwards to visit the slums of 
Boston and New York and compare them with those 
in Ireland, but he never saw the wretchedness of 
Cork and Dublin equalled or even approached in any 
American city. The heart of this country was then 
very bitter toward the English, who had " adored 
Jeff. Davis," and this feeling is well reflected in these 
Irish letters. He did not hesitate to attribute nine- 
tenths of the woes of the people to British misrule. 
In one place he declares that " none but the veriest 
churl of an Englishman could refuse to interchange 
greetings with this warm hearted people, whose bless- 
ings are cheap, and curses given away — the gift of a 
half-penny or its refusal will procure an unlimited 

2 



14 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

supply of either, and of the best quality without dis- 
tinction of price." Even the English themselves 
are at last beginning- to understand that they have 
blundered for generations in withholding kindly con- 
sideration from a brilliant if misguided race, which 
has been placed under their rule. It would have 
well repaid one of the great London dailies if they had 
made Mr. Williams their permanent correspondent at 
the cities of Ireland. Even the New York Tribune 
might profitably have kept on with these letters, 
although they had fulfilled the purpose of the editor 
and shown his readers that the Irish deserved a full 
measure of sympathy and the English an unstinted 
quota of condemnation. It was twenty years before 
Mr. Williams was able to revisit this field of his 
labors, and then his comparisons were cut short by a 
severe illness preventing him from noting as he had 
purposed the alleviations of more humane methods. 
When the war correspondent returned to Taunton 
he immediately resumed his work on the Gazette, but 
with a far different outlook. He had made a reputa- 
tion for himself in both Boston and New York, and 
found abundant opportunity to keep his pen busy. 
He also put some of the interesting material he had 
collected concerning the literature and conditions of 
Ireland into shape for lectures, and delivered a num- 
ber on various occasions. Four years quickly passed 
in these avocations, while their interest was consid- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 15 

erably increased by two winters spent in Boston as a 
member of the Massachusetts legislature. This was 
the only political office he ever held. He was re- 
elected to his second term by the entire constitu- 
ency, regardless of party lines, receiving 1,664 votes, 
while the other candidates elected had only 931 bal- 
lots cast in their favor. While in the legislature he 
became an ardent advocate of the cause of woman 
suffrage, and opened the great debate which took 
place April 20th, 1870. He stated that he believed 
the women of the commonwealth were competent to 
take an active part in the affairs of the country ; that 
politics would be purer and men and women better 
and wiser if the latter were allowed to exercise the 
right of suffrage. The vote which followed resulted 
in a defeat of the measure by a vote of 68 yeas to 133 
nays. Mr. Williams was very much in earnest at the 
time in favor of the introduction of this novel element 
into political life, but he did not take the defeat of 
his favorite measure too seriously, and never resumed 
his advocacy of the reform. He had every oppor- 
tunity to continue as an active politician in his native 
State, and was offered the nomination for the upper 
branch of the legislature, but his attention was now 
turned to other more important personal matters. 
He had married a wife, and, therefore, could not pay 
too much attention to such trifles as the enfranchise- 
ment of the sex in general. He recognized that one 



16 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

member of that sex in particular had now the first 
call upon his energies, and he cast about for some 
practical method of increasing his income. He had 
taken to heart some years before the advice of his 
patron saint in journalism, Horace Greely, to go 
West as soon as he could and grow up with the 
country. An opportunity had not yet come to him, 
but in the autumn of this year he was offered, at a 
reasonable price, the ownership of a little newspaper 
called the Investigator, in the flourishing town of 
Neosho, which lies in the southwestern corner of 
Missouri on the line of the Pacific railroad, and then 
contained some 2,000 inhabitants. He soon closed 
the bargain, and, packing up his few household goods, 
started toward the setting sun on the 24th of Novem- 
ber. He was given a most friendly send off by his 
friends in the profession around Taunton, and was 
welcomed by the Missourians with much heartiness 
and hospitality. 

The young couple soon found that they had made 
no mistake in setting up for themselves on the 
prairies of the West. The awkward name of "Inves- 
tigator" was soon changed to that of "Journal." 
New presses, type and other supplies were pur- 
chased, and it became evident that a new force had 
appeared in the community. Within a month edi- 
torials began to appear regularly on Indian affairs, 
to the great surprise of a large number of the sub- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. IT 

scribers who had not been wont to feel much sym- 
pathy for the red-skins in the territory just across 
their border. The tribes were about beginning an- 
other agitation for some form of territorial organiza- 
tion, and the more intelligent among the chiefs 
eagerly welcomed the assistance offered them by the 
Yankee editor. Wm. P. Ross, the chief of the Chero- 
kees, was particularly attracted by the kind interest 
of the new editor, and a warm personal friendship 
sprang up between the two which only ended with 
the death of the chief some years later. There was 
an abundance of topics to be discussed in the com- 
munity in which Mr. Williams had cast his lot, but 
none of them awakened in him such a keen interest 
as the Indian question. He made many visits to the 
settlement of the Indians, attended many of their 
councils, and wrote much about them to the Eastern 
newspapers. He was as much at home among these 
semi-civilized savages as he had been among the in- 
habitants of the Irish bogs and fens. Here was an- 
other downtrodden race suffering cruel wrongs from 
those whose superior firearms and military organiza- 
tion had conquered the lands belonging to their an- 
cestors. The result of his observations (to use his 
own language) convinced him that the Indian of the 
Appalachian tribe, at least, was capable of civiliza- 
tion. " The Cherokees have made great progress 
and the change is not altogether in blood, although 

2* 



18 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

that is to a large extent the mark and sign of pro- 
gress, so that it may be said that the nation will be 
thoroughly civilized when it is white to all intents 
and purposes. In a few generations this will be 
accomplished and white will be the larger element." 
This view of the Indian question was confirmed in 
his mind by subsequent study, and he stoutly main- 
tained that the problem would be solved only by 
protecting the aborigines from the greed of the 
Caucasian race until intermarriage had produced a 
new people capable of taking on the semblance of 
civilization. The squaws were finding that white 
husbands treat them better than those of their own 
tribes, and, therefore, they were seeking marriage 
with the pale faces. This is the natural process of 
absorption, as old as the time of the rape of the 
Sabine women, and anyone who has been about 
among the Indians knows how rapidly the half 
breeds are taking the place of the original types. 
Mr. Williams pleaded for preservation of all the 
treaty rights of the tribes in the territory, and " for 
the preservation of the honor of the United States 
solemnly pledged to the Indians." By special invi- 
tation he attended the Grand Council of all the 
tribes held at Okmulgee, where he saw more speci- 
mens of the different tribes than were ever before 
collected together in any one place. He carefully 
noted the characteristics of each one, and spent 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. K* 

several days visiting - their different encampments. 
He found remnants of some once famous tribes and 
large numbers of others not so well known. Some 
were dressed in civilized garments and were hardly 
to be distinguished from ordinary American citizens. 
Others were adorned by the original paint and 
feathers of the savage. There were Cherokees, 
Creeks, Choctaws, Sacs, Foxes, Kiowas, Cheyennes, 
Comanches, Arapahoes, Osages, Apaches, Wacos, 
Caddos, Modocs, Pawnees, Wichitas, Towacconies. 
Of the tribes formerly inhabiting the eastern part of 
the country there were still many striking represent- 
atives, such as the Senecas, Delawares and Seminoles. 
Some of the still powerful Sioux were there, while 
the government was very busy with their brothers 
farther north, where they were yet to show their 
courage in fierce battles with the United States 
army. It was a great opportunity to observe and 
describe the last of the former possessors of this 
continent, and it was well improved. Mr. Williams 
employed much time during the four years before this 
in fully qualifying himself to write at length on this 
subject, and toward the last he took many occasions 
to impress his views upon as large an audience as 
he could reach through eastern as well as western 
journals. If he could have resided permanently at 
Neosho, he would have become a recognized authority 
on this important matter, and no doubt could have 



20 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

done much to alleviate the wrongs and sufferings of 
the wards of the nation. He did what he could sub- 
sequently in Providence, however, and heartily sup- 
ported the efforts of the Indian Rights Association 
in every possible way. 

There was no lack of stir and activity in the life of 
an industrious newspaper man in the southwest. He 
was running an aggressive Republican journal in a 
Democratic community, and was very active in 
politics. He came very near being elected to the 
Missouri legislature by the acquiescence of a large 
number of his opponents, who refused to vote against 
him. He was a member of the Congressional com- 
mittee in his district, and was recognized by the St. 
Louis papers as a rising light on the horizon. In 
1872 he felt obliged to vigorously oppose the election 
of Horace Greely to the presidency, and penned 
many sharp editorials to show why it would not be 
safe to trust the Democrats with power, even under 
such a leader. After the campaign was over he was 
called upon to perform the sad duty of writing an 
obituary of his friend, in which he poured out 
deserved and unstinted praise for the great man who 
had moulded public opinion in the North for so 
many years and always guided it toward truth and 
humanity. Mr. Williams never let partisan bitter- 
ness rankle in his bosom. After elections he claimed 
that the fight was over, and all should be good 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 21 

friends until a few days before the next contest. 
There was an entire lack of solemnity in his attacks 
on his foes, and he was always, like an Irishman, 
going 1 into a scrimmage just for the excitement of the 
thing. 

It must have surprised the readers of a little 
country newspaper, published in a small border town, 
to have had so many topics of world-wide interest 
discussed with such ability in its editorial columns _ 
Here was a man who did not hesitate to tell a com- 
munity, which looked with slight criticism on the 
operations of the notorious James gang, that only 
barbarians supported bandits, and that there could 
be no progress in their country until such lawlessness 
was put down with an iron hand. He did not hesitate 
to personally join the sheriff's posse, and hunt out- 
laws at the risk of his life. There was no quarter 
given on either side when the representatives of 
order met the desperadoes. They never brought in 
-a prisoner, but left several lonely graves on the 
prairie. There were not so many of these incidents, 
however, in the course of the year, as to interfere at 
all with such peaceful avocations as writing poetry 
and delivering lectures on historical and literary 
topics, for the benefit of various churches and lyceums. 
At the time of the Virginius affair he earnestly 
advocated the annexation of Cuba, and gave most 
cogent reasons for such a course. If the sentiment 



'2'2 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

of the country could only have crystallized sufficiently 
to have enabled President Grant to have accom- 
plish this achievement, hundreds of thousands of 
lives would have been saved and tens of millions of 
dollars. He said then " the best citizens of Cuba 
desire annexation. Spain has no title to be con- 
sidered. The United States is strong enough to 
sustain the burden, has the life blood of virtue and 
intelligence to spare to pour into the island and 
regenerate it, and it seems to us a duty that we ought 
not to shirk." He was an ardent admirer of General 
Grant and heartily supported him. The well re- 
membered incident when the President vetoed the 
passage of the inflation measure passed by Congress 
called forth his warmest praise. Although Missouri 
was undoubtedly a soft money State then, as it is 
now, the Neosho Journal advocated a sound currency 
and received a rather unexpected support in so doing. 
He discovered that "the sound sense and honest 
feeling of the people did not wish inflation, even at 
the West and South, where the suffering is greatest, 
and the money most needed." The people of the 
country were growing very tired of the Republican 
Congress, and the revolt was spreading. Nothing 
saved the party from overwhelming' disaster, and the 
country from financial ruin, except this brave act of 
the President. When the defeat in the Congressional 
election occurred in November of that year, the talk 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 23 

of a third term for Grant became louder, and, swayed 
by his appreciation for what the old soldier had done 
for the nation, Mr. Williams became an ardent advo- 
cate of such a continuation of power. It is easy to 
see now that this would have been a serious mistake, 
and it is well for the country that the experiment was 
not tried. As Ave look back to that period and note 
the scandals like the Credit Mobilier, involving the 
retirement of Schuyler Colfax, the persistent attempts 
at inflation, the back pay grab, and the general 
rottenness in party management, it is no wonder that 
there was a willingness in many thoughtful minds to 
adopt even the drastic remedy of a dictatorship to 
suppress the wide spread corruption. The whole 
AVest was particularly stirred by the revelations of 
the wide-reaching conspiracy, known as the Credit 
Mobilier. On this topic Mr. Williams was well posted , 
as he came from the district represented by Oakes 
Ames. Congress tried to make the latter the scape- 
goat on which to visit its severest punishment, but 
Mr. Williams pointed out that while the Massachu- 
setts member deserved the harshest criticism, there 
were others more guilty than he. Subsequent events 
fully justified this stand, and the general spirit of 
independence which was shown by the Journal was 
a credit to its editor and to the community which 
supported it. It was easy for him to see, after the 
elections, that the party could not long remain in 



24 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

power and carry such a load of blunders and crimes. 
He was not able to remain in charge of the Journal 
until the campaign of 1876, which resulted in the 
momentous contest of Hayes and Tilden, and was 
nearly followed by a revolution in 1877 when the 
Republican was seated at the White House. There 
is not space here to give more than a summary of the 
topics which were handled by a free hand in an un- 
trammeled manner. The death of Charles Sumner 
called forth a worthy tribute to his worth as a states- 
man. Civil Service reform was advocated with much 
force and earnestness, while the local need of a larger 
population led him to form an immigration society 
for the purpose of attracting settlers from Europe 
and the East. His duties as leader of public opinion 
were fully realized and intelligently studied, and 
there is no doubt that he would have more than kept 
pace with the growth of the West had he been per- 
mitted to remain in so congenial a field. It was his 
fate, however, to pay the penalty which all are obliged 
to suffer after once contracting malarial fever. The 
seeds sown in his system while lying in the trenches 
at Port Hudson started to grow again in the summer 
of 1875, and produced a long and suffering attack of 
chills and fever. After struggling for months with 
this illness, it finally became evident to the doctors 
that their patient must seek a different climate and 
never return to a district subject to the visitations of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 25 

this disease. With sad hearts the editor and his 
wife were compelled to realize the situation. The 
newspaper property was disposed of at a great 
sacrifice, the result of five years hard work were all 
swept away, and the invalid was taken back to Massa- 
chusetts to endeavor to work back to life. 

He was not a man to give up the fight, however, 
and as soon as he could be about again he gladly 
accepted a position as reporter, at twelve dollars a 
week, on the Providence Journal. Thus began a 
work which was destined to last for fifteen years. 
His promotion to the post of editorial writer fol- 
lowed within a year, and his pay was made sufficient 
to give him a comfortable home. For seven years 
he wrote a very large portion of the editorial matter 
which appeared in the Journal, under the supervision 
of his chief, George W. Danielson. This work was 
not as congenial to him as the stirring labors he had 
just left in Missouri. He had to look at the ques- 
tions of the day through spectacles handed him by 
another, and this is always hard for one to do who 
has previously held an independent command. He 
performed his work faithfully, however, and to the 
entire satisfaction of his employers. He found time 
to collect the material and write a book on Irish 
Poetry, which attracted the most favorable attention 
and found a place in the libraries of the few who are 
interested in this subject. He also began the forma- 

3 



26 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

tion of tile library which he afterwards brought up 
to a very valuable collection of books, and finally 
bequeathed to the Providence Public Library. The 
sudden death of Mr. Danielson, in 1884, followed by 
that of Senator Anthony a few months later, changed 
completely the placid life of literary work, and thrust 
upon him the executive duties of managing editor. 
He then found himself again at a post where he 
could express his own views on the topics of the day, 
and was not obliged to perform so much of the 
drudgery of editorial writing. When the reorgani- 
zation of the property was completed, he was able to 
purchase an interest in the stock, which still farther 
increased his desire to make a name for himself 
among the editors of the country. He had, how- 
ever, a difficult position to fill, owing to the peculiar 
conditions of Rhode Island politics. There was no 
such compact little oligarchy anywhere as that which 
ruled the destinies of this commonwealth. Anthony 
and Danielson had run the machine for years, and 
the Journal was their organ. Their successors did 
not care enough for a mouthpiece to purchase the 
newspaper, and wanted it understood that they de- 
sired only to be let alone. This separation of two 
such great powers in the State naturally attracted 
much attention, and everywhere curiosity was aroused 
to see how the Journal could support itself without 
the patronage of the throne. A trial of strength was 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 27 

not long in coming 1 . In the year 1886 Mr. Williams 
actually had the audacity to support the Democratic 
candidate for governor against that staunch Repub- 
lican, George Peabody Wetmore. The struggle was 
a most interesting one, and to those who were not 
too deeply dyed in the wool, a most amusing spec- 
tacle. The wrath of the faithful was very great, and 
was publicly made evident by a solemn function 
which took place at the leading theatre in Provi- 
dence. Mr. Williams, as an individual, was invited 
to be present and witness the official execution of 
the editor of the Journal. The axe fell on the neck 
of the recalcitrant journalist, but the man was left 
alive and laughing. This, however, was almost the 
only exhibition of anger on the part of the defeated 
politicians. They soon recovered their good nature 
and kindly allowed the Journal to fill out its full 
growth as a vigorous newspaper. During all the 
years that Mr. Williams was in politics there was 
no single incident which amused him so much as 
this one, when he was "read out" of the party he 
had worked with for a quarter of a century. 

His enjoyment of his life at this time would have 
been complete had not the failing health of his wife 
caused him the deepest anxiety. For more than fif- 
teen years she had been his helpmeet in every vicis- 
situde of fortune, and his dependence on her counsel 
and assistance had grown greater and greater. Just 



28 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

at the time when he needed her the most she was 
taken away from him, leaving him utterly desolate 
for the remainder of his life. He never recovered 
from the shock of this calamity. He was obliged, 
almost immediately, to drop his work and seek 
relief in an ocean voyage. He once more visited 
Ireland, hoping to be distracted by revisiting the 
old scenes of his former journeyings. He had 
scarcely landed at Queenstown, however, when he 
was seized with fever and lay sick for weeks in the 
house of a friend. As soon as he recovered he began 
writing letters, and strove to recall the events of long 
ago. This labor seemed to bring him much relief, 
and after a few months he returned to his desk in 
Providence. For over two years he struggled on, 
but he could only struggle, he could not carry his 
work along easily. The routine became oppressive 
to him and he gave up more and more to others. 
Finally, in 1891, he decided to go to London to con- 
sult with the best physicians there. He never re- 
turned to his place on the Journal. Another phase 
of his active career had ended. The six years had 
been full enough of incident, although life in Provi- 
dence could never possess the elements of personal 
adventure and open air incident which had character- 
ized his sojourn in the West. Many a time he longed 
for the freedom of the old days which none of the 
superior comforts of more settled communities could 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 29 

give him. He was not a man who cared for social 
relaxation. He preferred above all other occupation 
an evening* at home with a book in his hand, but he 
had not the leisure he desired to give to literary 
work. 

The opportunity now came to him to be relieved 
from detail work and devote all his thoughts to sub- 
jects of a wider ranger. The door was opened to 
him to enter just such employments as he could best 
carry on. First, however, he must regain his health. 
After a few months rest he thought this was suffi- 
ciently restored to enable him to start for Texas, 
there to gather information regarding the life of 
Sam Houston, the famous pioneer. He only got as 
far as Washington when he was taken seriously ill, 
and was ordered by the doctors to return home as 
soon as he was able to travel. He started again by 
sea after a few months, and had a most successful 
trip. He was then able to finish his book, which 
was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and adds 
an important chapter to the history of the great 
State which revolted, in 1846, from Mexico, and was 
brought into the Union by its first President. The 
favorable comment received by him on this work, 
and the experiences he enjoyed in Texas while col. 
lecting the material, encouraged him very much- 
He had first heard of Houston particularly while 
associating with the Indians during his residence at 

3* 



30 ALFRED M. "WILLIAMS. 

Neosho. The fame of the old pioneer was still kept 
alive in many a wigwam, and the more Mr. Williams 
looked into the story of his life the more he became 
convinced that he could rescue important details 
from oblivion. He had had this work in mind for 
fifteen years, but feared he would never have leisure 
to complete it. The ease and promptness which 
attended his final efforts showed him that he could 
now undertake even more ambitious designs, and 
devote his energies entirely to such compilations. 
He realized, however, that it was necessary for him 
to find a more suitable winter climate than that of 
Narragansett Bay, and he decided to visit the West 
Indies. He was not mistaken in his choice. Once 
within the charms of those happy isles he was aware 
that he need seek no further for a place of residence. 
He also found there just the material he desired to 
work upon, and it seemed to him that he could ask 
for no greater opportunities than those now within 
his grasp. He had studied carefully the folk-lore of 
Ireland, he had followed some remarkable Indian 
legends from one tribe to another, and on the shores 
of the Caribbean Sea he ran across traces of myths, 
brought from Africa by the negroes, which showed 
that there have been experiences in common among 
the earlier inhabitants of Europe, North America and 
Africa. It seemed possible to work up many analo- 
gies illustrating the persistence of legends through 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 31 

all peoples and ages, and, therefore, proving that 
they must have been founded on actual facts. It 
was a work to which an enthusiast could easily have 
devoted twenty years and not have exhausted the 
outer fringe of the material to be gone over. St. 
Kitts was the island selected for a winter home on 
the second visit, and it was as delightful a one as 
could be found in any part of the world. Near by is 
an island owned by the Dutch, called Saba, which is 
an extinct volcano. The only settlements on this 
island are in the crater. Here the people live, sur- 
rounded by high walls, and almost cut off from all 
intercourse with the rest of the world. There are 
families of negroes who never come into contact with 
off-islanders, and are descended from slaves brought 
direct from Africa. This was chosen as the very 
first spot to be investigated, for here it seemed that 
the threads of the skein might be found at their be- 
ginnings. A passage was engaged on a fishing boat, 
and the island reached. While riding up. the only 
narrow trail which leads over the top of the crater 
wall, he was thrown from his horse, receiving a sharp 
blow on the head. He thought nothing of the inci- 
dent but went on with his work, and returned to St. 
Kitts with a goodly quantity of notes. This was the 
end of all his labors, however. He was seized with 
an attack of cerebral congestion, and died March 9, 
1896, without regaining consciousness. It seemed 



32 ALFRED M. WILLIAMS. 

sad that the end should come to him thus alone in a 
strange land, and if he could have been spared he 
would have written a book worthy of the subject to 
which he was devoted. Literature would have been 
enriched by such an addition to its pages, and much 
light might have been thrown upon matters now 
hidden from our view. The man himself, however, 
if given his choice, would have asked for no more 
fitting close to his career. He was giving himself to 
a cause worthy of any man's efforts, and if his fate 
decreed that he was to be stricken down while strug- 
gling for more light on a dark subject, he would be 
the last one to complain. He began his life as soon 
as he was able to choose his path as a student, and 
he finished it while happily employed. Other labor- 
ers are busy in the field of folk-lore, and will, event- 
ually, go over the same ground that Mr. Williams 
had mapped out as his specialty. 

EICHAED S. HOWLAND. 



FIRST VISIT 



UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

i. 

THE ISLAND OF NEVIS. 

A QUAINT OLD HOUSE OF THE ANCIENT PERIOD— DELIGHTS 
OF A VOYAGE DOWN THE WINDWARD ISLANDS — THE 
PAST AND PRESENT OF CHARLESTOWN. 

Antigua, W. L, February 12, '95. 

Where are the swallows fled ? 

Frozen and dead. 
Perchance upon some bleak and stormy shore. 

Ah, no. 
Far over summer seas 
They wait in grateful ease 
The balmy southern breeze 
To bring them to their southern home once more. 

These lines by Adelaide Anne Proctor might well 
illustrate the almost swallow flight of the fortunate 
voyagers who leave the bleak and barren shores of 
New England for a sojourn in the lotus lands of the 
West Indies. When the good steamship Madiana 
left the port of New York on February 2 it was in a 
heavy snowstorm, which almost obscured the outlines 



36 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

of the shore. The bay was full of floating ice, which 
tossed and ground in the murky and leaden water. 
When the steamer passed Sandy Hook it was in the 
teeth of a heavy gale, and as she ploughed her strong 
way toward the south the breakers washed over the 
sides and the deck was slippery with sliding streams. 
For the first two days the hardier passengers, who 
ventured on deck to taste the acrid and inspiring 
breath of the breeze, wore their heaviest wraps, or 
sought refuge in the warm smoking room. The 
tables were very thinly tenanted, and from the state- 
rooms came the inarticulate but very intelligible 
sounds of sea-sickness. By the third day, when the 
vessel had entered the Gulf Stream, the atmosphere 
began to have a softer feeling and the passengers 
gradually to occupy their steamer chairs and to watch 
the miles of glittering foam, sparkling in the sun- 
shine, with somewhat more tranquil minds. With 
every hour it seemed to grow warmer and brighter, 
the sea to become a more translucent blue and the 
atmosphere to take on a softer and more opaline hue. 
Great patches of brown seaweed flecked the waves, 
and flying fish darted in spots of glittering white 
from the gentle billows. From day to day the wraps 
diminished in weight and the cabin was almost 
entirely deserted for the deck, where some wasted 
their time in reading or talk, and others more wise 
drank in the beauty and vastness of the ineffable sea. 



THE ISLAND OF NEVIS. 37 

On the afternoon of the fifth day the first land was 
visible like a misty cloud on the horizon, which 
gradually grew nearer and took more definite shape 
as a mountainous island. It was St. Thomas. Its 
first aspect was not tropical. There were no palm 
trees waving on the summits of the hills, which 
looked somewhat bare and barren, and without any 
richness of green in their vegetation. By night we 
were at anchor in the harbor, which is one of the 
finest in the world, perfectly landlocked and sheltered 
from every gale. In days gone by St. Thomas was 
the great entreport of the "West Indies. Its harbor 
was crowded with vessels of every maritime nation, 
and its great warehouses, which are now empty and 
falling to decay, were filled with merchandise. When 
we arrived it was animated with the presence of the 
three white ships of the American squadron, headed 
by the New York, and by a single French, German 
and Russian warship. The air was vocal with the 
shrill whistles of the boatswains, and the twelve oared 
cutters and steam launches were crossing each other 
in every direction. In the evening the bands played 
their national anthems, and the fiery notes of the 
Marseillaise were responded to by the sturdy Der 
Wacht an JRliein, while the Russians brazenly entone 
God Save the Czar, and from the farther distance the 
Star Spangled Banner warmed the American heart. 
All this time the little town lay quiet and still 



38 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

beneath its red-tilecl roofs and under the shelter of 
its circling hills, and the garrison of home-sick 
soldiers, which Denmark maintains here, made no 
reply to the amicably defiant serenades of the float- 
ing visitors. On shore one finds that St. Thomas is 
fairly within the West Indies, with all the character- 
istics of the population, in which the blacks largely 
predominate, and in the woods the vegetation is 
distinctly tropical, with the palms, the mahogany 
and the gigantic silk-cotton tree, with smooth bark 
and bulging trunks. 

But the most distinctly West Indian island, which 
we have yet seen, our port of call including St. 
Thomas, St. Croix and St. Kitts, is the little island 
of Nevis. It is not in the regular routes of the 
steamers, but is gained in an hour and a half's sail by 
a small boat from Basse Terre, St. Kitts. The morn- 
ing was a delightful one, the sky full of soft, fleecy 
clouds, which now and then darkened into mist and 
rain, sweeping in sheets of falling water over the 
wine-dark sea, and again lifting into white veils upon 
the mountain tops and letting the sun shine in un- 
clouded lustre upon the sparkling vegetation and the 
sea, which was turned by its caress to the richest 
turquoise blue. The white gulls screamed with that 
voice which is the very accent- of the ocean, as they 
swept about in what seemed like a madness of activity, 
and now and then a greater pelican would wing his 



THE ISLAND OF NEVIS. 39 

heavy way above the sea. The little steamer coasted 
along- the shore of St. Kitts with its high hills 
apparently covered with unbroken forest, and then 
played and rolled through the heavy waves that 
swept throiigh the channel, which divides the island 
from Nevis. Nevis is dominated by a lofty hill, 
which looks down on the open roadstead. This morn- 
ing it wore a light gauze veil of vapor around its 
summit, but down its sides there were patches of the 
soft green verdure of the cane fields, and the darker 
woods were bathed in the sunlight. As we approached 
the shore the white foam of the breakers was seen 
combing far up on the beach, and the heavy thunder 
of their fall gave a strong symphony of ocean music. 
The sea was so rough that the steamer could not 
approach the wharf, and the few passengers were 
transferred to the shore by the skillful hands of the 
negro boatmen. 

The town of Charlestown, which is the capital of 
Nevis, is a small hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants, 
and is hardly more than a single street, stretching 
along the open beach. On the sea front there is a 
single line of cocoa palms lifting their feathered 
heads high in air, and beneath them are the huts of 
the negro fishermen, with their boats hauled up on 
the beach and their nets drying in the sun. The 
town is made of quaint old houses of the ancient 
period of West Indian architecture, with mossy stone 



40 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

walls and tiled, roofs. There are no signs of any 

business except a few shops of general merchandise, 
and an air of gentle decay broods over the whole 
place. There is a little public garden of a few feet 
square, in which roses and rhododendrons were in 
bloom, and round it were a few negro women with 
cakes and vegetables for sale. The white population 
were few, but in amends the negroes were many. 
Strong black wenches passed by with heavy burdens 
on their heads, walking with that firm, solid and 
graceful step which comes from the habit of carrying 
burdens, with only the movement of the hips, the 
bust and head remaining perfectly steady and up- 
right. All were smiling and happy, showing their 
white teeth and ready to respond with a soft "good 
m-a-a-wning " in the sweet, drawling Creole accent. 
Some were carrying' baskets of bright colored "West 
Indian fish of strange shapes and abnormal aspect, 
and others great burdens of vegetables, boxes and 
loads of every miscellaneous character. One would 
not have been surprised to see a negress with a 
kerosene lamp or a mirror on her head, or, if there 
were a square piano on the island, to see it borne 
with a steady step by four of these women caryatide. 
The men seemed to have little to do, and to be doing 
that without any energy. They idled on street cor- 
ner and talked with a conversation heavily punctuated 
with guffaws, or munched sugar cane in sleek and 



THE ISLAND OF NEVIS. -±1 

shiny content. Shoes, it is needless to say, were un- 
known, and garments were reduced to the simpliest 
articles of necessity. Altogether Charlestown seemed 
sunk in a gentle and tranquil sleep, its slumber 
soothed with the tranquil booming of the surf, and 
steeping in the warmth of the kindly sun. 

But Charlestown was once as wealthy and lively a 
place for its size as any in the "West Indies. In the 
days when a plantation in the rich soil of Xevis was 
a gold mine, there were wealthy merchants who dwelt 
here, and a rich and luxurious planting population 
to lead a grand train of luxury and expense. Besides, 
Charlestown was the Saratoga of the West Indies, 
where all the wealth and fashion of the Windward 
Island gathered to spend the season at the famous 
sulphur baths. About ten minutes walk from the 
town are the ruins of an immense stone hotel, which 
must have been able to accommodate several hundred 
guests. It now looks like the ruins of an ancient 
castle, so heavy are the crenelated walls of a massive 
grey, 

" By the caper overrooted, by the gourd overscored," 

and three magnificent nights of stone steps lead up 
to the lofty entrance hall. One can imagine what 
bevies of dark and languid Creole beauties in diapha- 
nous muslins have passed up those steps, escorted by 
white-coated planters, or officers from the ships and 



42 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

garrisons in more brilliant uniforms, or danced and 
flirted in the lofty ball room, where now the clothes 
of the negro family which keeps the bath are hung 
to dry. Only the central portion of the building is 
roofed, the top story of the -wing having entirely 
fallen in, and from the walled terrace to which one 
climbs by a rickety stair there is a magnificent view 
of the town and the gleaming plain of the sea, while 
the soft and spicy breeze gently caresses the cheeks. 
It is a gentle river embowered in luxuriant vegeta- 
tion that has kindly wrapped and softened its decay, 
and is perhaps more suited to the scene than when it 
was alive with hilarious gayety. 

The bath house is at the foot of a gentle declivity 
in front of the hotel. It is an ancient and dilapidated 
building, whose battered doors move reluctantly on 
their hinges. To get to the bath you descend a long 
flight of brick steps leading to a pool of limpid green 
water with a gentle stir and flow. It is dark, the only 
light coming through cracks in the shutters, and it is 
not reassuring to hear the scuttle of a lizard or some 
other beast as you reach the platform. However, 
you take heart and disrobe. At the first step the 
water seems unpleasantly warm, but soon a gentle 
languor and a sense of infinite deliciousness comes 
over you. You fairly wallow in delight as you 
sit with the water rippling up to your chin, and 
you feel that you could rest for hours in absolute 



THE ISLAND OF NEVIS. 43 

beatitude as the gentle warmth steals through your 
limbs. And when you emerge you feel as though 
you had never been clean before, so complete is the 
sense of the removal of all impurities. It is like the 
fountain of youth in its effects, and if Ponce de Leon 
had found it he would have been assured temporarily 
at least that the object of his long quest had been 
attained. Although a strong sulphur spring, there 
is not the slightest unpleasant smell, such as some- 
times accompanies a mineral bath, and the waters 
are of a limpid purity. Its effects are considered 
very good for rheumatic complaints, and stories of 
wonderful cures are told of its waters. It does not 
seem impossible that in the future, when the attrac- 
tions of the West Indies as a winter resort become 
better known, that a new hotel may arise near the 
old one, and that an unusual crowd of visitors from 
the United States may replace with their exotic ways 
the departed glories_of the extinct Creole aristocracy. 
There are certainly far less attractive places where 
fashion resorts in search of health or to dissipate the 
burden of its ennui. But in that case Charlestown 
would cease to be a typical West Indian town and 
become a mere tourist caravansary like Bermuda or 
St. Augustine, and those who can now delight in its 
quaint and old-world flavor would not come to be 
dinned and dazed by American hotel life. 

Nevis is not one of the historical West India 



44 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

islands. It was not fought for and refought for as 
were the other islands when France, Spain and 
England struggled for the possession of the pearls of 
the Antilles, nor was it a place of enormous loots, as 
was the neighboring island of St. Eustatia when 
Rodney swooped upon it. Everyone will tell you 
that it was the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, as 
they will in Santa Cruz that the illustrious Peter 
Jackson first saw the light there. A more famous 
man than either has, however, left the trace of his 
visit there. In the old Fig Tree Church, a few miles 
from town, the register shows that Horatio Nelson, 
then a post-captain in the British navy, was there 
married to Mrs. Fanny Nesbitt, the faithful woman 
whom he deserted for the brazen charms of Lady 
Hamilton, and of whom he wrote in one of the most 
singular expressions of feeling ever uttered by man 
" that if the Lord should remove the obstacle to their 
union," meaning with his mistress, as though heaven 
should interfere to sanction his adultery by murder. 
Meditating upon the strangeness of humanity, we 
may leave Nevis to its sempiternal calm. 



II. 

POET OF SPAIN. 

THE LARGEST TOWN IN THE WINDWARD ISLANDS — A 
GLIMPSE OF HINDOSTAN IN A COOLIE VILLAGE. 

Port of Spain, Trinidad, February 22, '95. 

It was the early morning when the Madiana bore 
rip for one of the Dragon's Mouths, which separates 
the Gulf of Paris from the open sea, and whose fierce 
currents so embarrassed the caravels of Columbus. 
The entrance is narrow, with precipitous heights on 
either side, covered with primeval vegetation, and 
showing no signs of habitation, save here and there, 
where some steep ravine broke the wall, and a fisher- 
man's hut shone white amid the embowering foliage 
with his boat upon the beach and his net drying in 
the sun. The sky was fleecy bright, with delicate 
opaline tints, and the early moon spread a rosy tint 
over the green sea, for in these shallower waters the 
ocean has lost its turquoise tint. The gulls were 
busy questing their morning repast, and the pelicans 
were winging their heavy flight along the beaches. 
Now and then some hideous hammer-headed shark, 



46 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

who comes near to be the most unformed and 
villainous monster that haunts the seas, would dart 
away from the side of the ship and sink like a shadow 
in the dark depths. All these waters are haunted by 
the memory of Robinson Crusoe of York, mariner, 
who, although but a figment of the brain, is yet more 
substantial than any of the living persons of to-day, 
and will exist in perennial life long after the Madiana 
has disintegrated into iron rust, and its passengers 
been forgotten as if they had never been. It might 
have been such a current as this in the Dragon's 
Mouth which swept his periagua at sea when he 
started out to visit the wrecked ship, and one of the 
blue islets in this far distance was the one on which 
he lived his life of busy solitude. It was this very 
great island of Trinidad from which came the canni- 
bals, who made merry on human flesh around their 
cook fires, and upon whom he and his man Friday 
" let fly in the name of God," which has so often 
been the method of impressing the lessons of civiliza- 
tion upon the heathen savages. 

But the current of the Dragon's Mouth does not 
impede the strong way of the Madiana, and in a short 
time we have opened out the broad bay surrounded 
by circling shores, and the town of Port of Spain lies 
before us. It is not yet nine o'clock, but the heat is 
already intense. In the thinnest of summer suits we 
perspire drippingly, and it takes some courage to face 



PORT OF SPAIN. 47 

the thought of going- ashore to the low-lying town 
that seems to shimmer as if with a furnace heat. 
However, we are here to see the sights, and must not 
shrink from a vapor bath, or even from the appre- 
hension of a sun-stroke. Port of Spain is much the 
largest town in the Windward Islands, and has all the 
appearance of a tropical city in its architecture and 
ways. Streams of open water flow through the 
gutters, and the scavengering buzzards hop lazily 
away from under your feet. Everybody is en negli- 
gee with panamas and flowing garments, and even 
the policemen are 

" Clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful," 

but with all the proverbial dignity of their class. 
But Port of Spaiu is only like the rest of the "West 
Indies, with the additional flavor of a somewhat 
cosmopolitan port, and perhaps a slightly larger pro- 
portion of drinking shops. There is, however, a 
colony near through which we may hope to catch a 
glimpse of Hindostan without the fatigue of the 
long journey to farther India. It is the Coolie village, 
where the workmen who were brought from India to 
supply a more tractable and persevering labor than 
that of the negroes live. The mind is somewhat 
made up to see a white and clear compound em- 
bosomed under the shade of embowering trees in 
which white-clothed figures move gently about or sit 



48 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

plying their handicrafts in the shade, while women 
in parti-colored robes nurse their brown children or 
cook their rice over little fires. The reality is far 
different from this. The village, which is about a 
mile from the extremity of the town, is a single long 
street of miserable wooden huts, thatched with straw 
or covered with corrugated iron, and not differing in 
any way from those of the negroes of the other 
islands. All life is open to the view. There are men 
in turbans and dingy white robes gathered at the 
thigh, who move about in various avocations, or 
driving teams of the hump-backed Indian cattle. 
They have sometimes finely-cut and aristocratic 
features, with long and lank black hair, and an air of 
subdued gravity quite different from the open- 
mouthed gayety of the negroes. Some of them lift 
their hands in salute, but without a smile, and many 
of them seem to wear an air of sullen dislike, while 
all are apathetic and manifest no curiosity at the 
sight of their visitors. Some of the jewelers, who 
make the bangles with which the women are uni- 
versally adorned, and who are in fact by this means 
the savings banks of their husbands, were at work 
under sheds over charcoal fires, and with no apparent 
implements except a pair of pincers and a small 
hammer, and there were a few other small shops in- 
cluding those " licensed to sell spirituous liquors by 
retail." Some women moved about with brown 



PORT OF SPAIN. ttl) 

naked children astride on their hips, their shapely 
arms decorated with silver bangles from the wrist to 
the elbow and with plaques in the fore-arm ; others 
bent over the cooking pots ; and others lay about in 
negligee atitudes lifting lazy eyes to glance at the 
carriage. If there had ever been any habit among 
their caste in India of concealing the face from the 
eyes of the strangers it had vanished during their 
sojourn in Trinidad, and they were as frank and 
indifferent as their neighbors, the negresses. There 
were not many striking figures among them either 
for beauty or originality. There was one old fellow 
with white hair and beard, who sat in a cart behind 
a pair of hump-backed oxen, who would have made 
a perfect picture of an Indian Silenus without the 
habit of intoxication. Contrary to most of his com- 
patriots, who are thin and spare, he was round and 
fat, with a rotund belly, and even an apparent tinge 
of red in his mahogany cheeks. He smiled broadly 
with a fat and good-humored smile that showed his 
white teeth, and passed on tranquil and content. 
There was also a beautiful baby boy of some three or 
four years of age, who was toddling beside the road- 
way, clad in a necklace and a pair of bangles. He 
lifted his large, deep and liquid eyes smilingly at us 
as we passed, and the brown skin of his delicately 
moulded limbs shone in the warm sun with a deep 
and lovely brown glow. If the old man was an 

5 



50 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Indian Silenus this was an Indian Cupid, that might 
have been pillowed in some gigantic lotus flower, and 
floated down the Ganges as in the ancient legend. 

But the most of the figures were commonplace, not 
to say sordid and miserable, and indeed it would 
have been folly to expect types of Indian beauty and 
distinction in a village of the lowest class of coolies 
transported to a foreign land, and subject to all the 
degrading influences of their surroundings. Still it 
must be confessed that there was somewhat of a dis- 
appointment in the lack of characteristic originality 
in this Hindoo village. Negroes are thickly scattered 
in the settlement, although the Hindoos refuse to 
mix with them matrimonially, and there was even the 
grinning sensual face of a fat Chinaman peering out 
from a doorway. In fact, negro features are quite 
as prominent as Hindoo in the aspect of the village. 
Two stout negro men were sitting in front of a hut 
playing the tam-tam, which is a sort of single-headed 
drum, with their fingers. They were playing with 
great energy and vigor, and the air was not without 
a sort of crude harmony in its rapid beat and reitera- 
tion. The tune may have been the one celebrated in 
" The Cruise of the Midge," 

O ! guinea corn, 
Niam, niam you, 

but it is said that there are some really very skillful 



PORT OF SPAIN. 51 

performers on these rude instruments, and Sir Spencer 
St. John, in his "Black Bepublic," gives a negro's 
account of a tam-tam tournament, which is as in- 
teresting- and spirited as the bagpipe contest between 
Kobin Oig and Allan Breck Stuart. The only other 
thing of interest in the coolie village was the temple. 
Temple indeed ! It was a miserable shed, hexagonal 
in shape and some twenty feet in diameter. It was 
open to the gaze of every passer, and within could 
be seen some images and religious paraphernalia, 
and an elderly priest was engaged in sprinkling some 
sort of incense around the room and upon a couch, 
which was apparently his bed. It did not look curi- 
ous enough to warrant the trouble of taking off the 
shoes to enter, although we were told that with that 
precaution and probably, also, with an offering, we 
might have done so without offence. The type of 
religion, which such a temple represented, did not 
seem more intelligent than the African rites of 
fetichism, which are probably still secretly practised 
in the same village, and some of the ultra-refined, 
who are trying to find in Buddhism a substitute for 
Christianity, would certainly have had a revulsion at 
the sight of this coolie temple. Beyond the village 
the road entered the deep, dark tropical forest, and 
finally came to a large white building in a clearing 
at some distance to one side. No object was visible 
about it, and an air of deathly stillness brooded 



53 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

over it, as it lay burning in the sun in the midst of 
the greenery. It was the leper hospital where this 
plague, imported from the Orient with the human 
packages of labor, was slowing eating out the lives 
of its victims, and threatening the island with its 
grim shadow. It was with something of a chill with 
which we turned back to the noisy and swarming life 
of the coolie village, and we were glad to escape 
from it into the town again. 

But it was not the last of the Hindoos. Some en- 
terprising agent of an American show had gathered 
a troupe with which to adorn a dime museum, and 
probably to exhibit as genuine East Indian jugglers. 
They were of all ages and appearances, and among 
them was one really handsome young woman. She 
had large, lustrous eyes, and a profile of Jewish 
regularity. She was richly dressed with a white 
muslin robe and a flowing upper garment of bright 
colors, which she drew over her head. She wore a 
large golden ornament in her nose, which fell below 
her lips, a jeweled band across her forehead, and her 
arms were literally covered with bangles and plaques 
from wrists to armpits. With her dress and orna- 
ments she might have sat for a picture of Spenser's 

Duessa, darkly bright, 
Adorned with diamonds and rich jewels rare. 

But, poor thing, she was not happy with all her 



PORT OF SPAIN. 53 

finery. As she sat on a camp stool in the stern of 
the launch, surrounded by a group of the passengers, 
who stared at her as if she was some wild animal, 
and made flippant remarks, whose purport she prob- 
ably understood, the dark eyes filled with tears, and 
she delicately lifted her nose ring to relieve with her 
handkerchief the expression of grief which affects 
the nostrils. She was going to a new, a strange and 
cold world, and she was leaving a home in the green 
woods with perhaps a lover or a mother there. Not 
all the glory of being placarded in letters a foot long 
as the daughter of the Akhoond of Swat or the 
Maharajah of Serinjapatam and sitting in state by 
the side of the fat woman and the india-rubber man 
will repay her for the easy, warm life of the tropics. 
Her mahogany skin will turn blue with cold, and her 
diaphanous robes be replaced by clumsy woolens, 
which even then will not keep out the keen and 
deathly chill of a sunless land. Perhaps she will 
meet death there, with his icy spear, and never see 
again the warm fields of Trinidad or the dusty plains 
of the Deecan. All this she knows not, but she is evi- 
dently suffering keenly. Fortunately the kind ladies 
in the ship welcomed her with all the grace and 
sympathy of gentle womanhood, and a faint smile or 
two came back to her face, as the Madiana bore 
away with thrashing propeller from Port of Spain, 
and she even endured the persecutions of the Kodak 

5* 



54 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

fiends, who have added a new burden to human 
existence, without wincing. But, after all, the gentle 
heart is sore for this simple daughter of the tropics, 
who is going to be made a show of, instead of leading 
her own natural life and bringing up her brown 
children under a thatched roof in the shade of the 
palms. 



SECOND VISIT 



III. 

ST. KITTS. 

A TYPICAL EVENING IN THE LEEWARD ISLES — THE OLD 
FORT ON BRIMSTONE HILL — SKETCHES AT SOMBRERO 
AND ST. KITTS — THE LITTLE TOWN OF BASSE TERRE 
— CHARM OF THE LOTUS LAND — SUBSTANTIAL STAG- 
NATION. 

Basse Terre, St. Kitts, Dec. 20, '95. 

The first land one sees in the direct course of 1500 
miles from New York to the Leeward Islands and 
from the grey seas of the North to the turquoise 
waters of the South, is Sombrero island, a barren 
peak like a sentinel at the entrance to the island 
gardens. Upon it the lighthouse gleamed in the 
dusk of the swiftly-falling night, and shone like a 
lurid spark on the horizon under the thickly-sown 
stars of the tropic sky. The keepers of this pole- 
star in the desert of the seas must lead a strange 
and lonely life watching the white sails appear and 
disappear on the horizon and the trails of' vapor of 
the steamers passing northward or southward, each 
on its way regardless of the inhabitants of the rock. 



58 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Their only visitor is the steamer of the lighthouse 
service on its quarterly round, and perhaps an occa- 
sional fisherman, and through the long days they 
may sleep, and at night keep watch and ward amid 
the sleepless wash or thunder of the seas, as much 
separated from the rest of the world as if they were 
on another planet. It is not likely that they have 
any sublime thoughts amid the mystery of the sea 
and the glory of the sky, or that their life is any- 
thing but the monotonous performance of their 
duties with the nostalgia, which must come to the 
dullest human mind in such an isolation. Sombrero 
has a tale of cruelty connected with it, perhaps only 
one out of many which have escaped record, in the 
days when pirate captains marooned their captives 
on desert islands to die of hunger and thirst, instead 
of more mercifully making them walk the plank. On 
the 14th of December, 1807, Capt. "Warwick Lake of 
Her Majesty's sloop, Kecruit, ordered a seaman of 
the name of Jefferies to be landed on the island, 
from which he was fortunately rescued by an Ameri- 
can vessel when on the verge of death by starvation. 
This was too much for the authorities of the Admir- 
alty, even in the days when the cat-o' -nine-tails stimu- 
lated the Britishjtars to victory, and Captain Lake 
was tried by court martial at Portsmouth and 
dismissed the service for his exaggerated ideas 
concerning the use of discipline. 



ST. KITTS. 59 

In the morning-, after having passed in the darkness 
the Danish island of St. Croix and the Dutch islands 
of Saba and St. Eustatia, one wakes in the roadstead 
of St. Kitts under the delightful grey freshness of 
the morning sky and with the soft breath of the 
tropic seas fanning the cheeks. The town lies in a 
basin of encircling hills, with the red roofs of its 
houses broken by tufts of verdure. The square 
tower of a dark stone church dominates the centre, 
and at either extremity are rows of palm trees, and 
beneath them the fishermen's huts with their nets 
drying in the sun and their boats drawn up on the 
beach. In the centre of the island rises the lofty 
cone of Mount Misery, wooded and green to the 
summit, which is wrapped in a lucent veil of cloud. 
The sea is calm, but a constant fringe of white foam 
rolls up along the beach, showing that the deep 
swell of the Caribbean seas is never still. Pelicans 
pass with the heavy flight of their beating wings 
above the glassy surface, or plung-e with a headlong 
splash into the water after a fish. White gulls flit 
about with that cry, which is the very voice of the 
winds and waves. The sails of the fishing boats 
gleam against the soft green of the circling shores 
as they are coasting out to sea, and two or three of 
the country sloops and an American three-masted 
schooner are riding easily at anchor. Everything 
has an air of quiet and tranquillity suited to the 



60 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

summer land, except the noisy negro boatmen, who 
are gathered in a flock around the steamer, clamor- 
ing for a chance to convey the passengers on shore. 
Their black faces shine and their white teeth glitter 
as they announce their claim to be the first to solicit 
the attention of massa and vaunt the excellence of 
the " Ellen Eose " or the " Mongoose." 

The little town of Basse Terre is soon traversed. 
It has a public square with a town clock in the centre, 
and a beautiful public garden or plaza embowered 
in tropical vegetation, and shaded at one end by a 
magnificent banyan tree, whose templed boughs and 
thick foliage makes almost a darkness in the sur- 
rounding gloom and glare. The shops and ware- 
houses are all old, but of solid stone, and have an 
air of substantial stagnation and calm resistance to 
the decay of prosperity, which has come with the fall 
in the price of sugar. On the side streets there are 
the residence houses of wood with their verandas 
and jalouses, mostly grey from want of paint, and 
having an air of gentle torpor. Stretching out into 
the country and along the farther beaches are the 
rows of negro huts of the flimsiest construction, 
whose inhabitants live mostly in the open air, and 
from whose yards rises the smoke of the cooking 
fires, and where the women are busy with their house- 
hold affairs, while their lords and masters are mostly 
loafing about in the sun. The children are inumer- 



ST. KITTS. 01 

able, mostly clad in a single garment, and as frisky 
and happy as little nigs and little pigs are pro- 
verbially supposed to be. Noav and then one sees 
the white face of some trader or planter or dapper 
clerk in the treasury office, or some pale and delicate 
Creole lady under her sunshade ; but for the most 
part the people are black, shading upward in all 
colors from the coffee-brown to the clear, colorless 
skin, the flashing dark eyes and shining black hair 
alone indicating the fatal tinge given by a remote 
drop of African blood. Some few are neatly dressed 
and evidently belong to the colored aristocracy. 
Clerks in stores, seamstresses, hlanchisseuses cle Jin, 
but for the most part they are coarsely clad, the men 
and women alike barefooted, and the latter with 
gayly colored handkerchiefs about their heads. 
They speak with the soft, drawling Creole accent, 
which cannot be interpreted in any words, but which 
from the lips of young women and children has a 
plaintive sweetness and grace altogether charming. 
If you are so fortunate as to have your window 
face the sea you will taste the full charm of this lotus 
land in the evening. When the red ball of the sun 
has touched the rim of the sea and then has suddenly 
sunk from sight, the large and brilliant stars and 
thickly sown constellations illumine the deep blue 
sky and sparkle in the tranquil waters. The soft 
wind, fresh with the life giving scent of the sea, blows 

6 



62 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

gently in, banishing all the heat from the cool dark- 
ness of the room. The calm, heavy roll of the surf 
fills the air with a monotonous murmur, the very 
lullaby of the tropic night. The lights of the boats 
gleam red in the harbor. Far on the horizon a 
ghostly sail is fading out of sight into the mystery 
of the sea. Under the window a girl passes singing 
a snatch of a plaintive Creole song. As so rarely in 
our fevered existence, absolute calm and tranquillity 
take possession of the spirit, and nature gives the 
bliss of perfect communion with the soul. • 

Some twelve miles from Basse Terre is the ancient 
fortress on Brimstone Hill. The road winds by the 
sea shore all the way. It is lined with negro cabins, 
mostly of a single room each, of wood, raised on 
stones or posts, some two or three feet from the 
ground, and without glass to the windows. Some 
few are of still more primitive construction of wattled 
cane and thatched roofs. Above them wave the 
feathery tops of the palms, as they are shaded by the 
deeper greens of the tamarinds and the mossy foliage 
of the banyans with drooping festoons of fibres. 
The deep scarlet hibiscus and other brilliant flowers 
bloom here arid there by the roadside. At times we 
pass through long fields of cane waving and rustling 
in the wind, and here and there men are cutting it 
with their heavy machetas, while the women are roll- 
ing it into huge bundles and carrying it on their 



ST. KITTS. 63 

heads to the carts. At long distances rise the tall 
chimneys of the sugar works from the low white 
buildings of the plantation and the thick sweet smell 
of boiling sugar fills the air. Men are piling the 
megass, or refuse of the crushed sugar cane, into huge 
stacks, which have a smell like dried corn husks. 
Some of the fields have already been reaped, and men 
and women are engaged in replanting the rich black 
earth with lusty strokes of the great clumsy hoes. 
In some of the fields the fresh green plants are 
already sprouting. Every now and again we pass 
through the bed of a dried stream, carefully paved 
with stones to prevent the ford from being washed 
away, and surmounted by a high stone foot-bridge, 
giving token of what torrents sometimes pour down 
from the mountains in the rainy season. Then we 
come to a clear running stream dashing among dark 
rocks and boulders. Up the stream, under the green 
shade of the trees, negro women are standing in the 
water with their skirts trussed to mid-leg, engaged 
in massacring garments with wooden pestles for the 
benefit of the button manufacture. At about half the 
distance we come upon the picturesque village of 
Old Road, stretched along both sides of the highway, 
with its substantial church and ruined or abandoned 
old colonial houses among the cheap shops and 
negro cabins. This was the site of the first English 
settlement of the island, which was made under Sir 



64 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Thomas Warner in 1623. A French colony afterward 
amicably divided the island, settling- at Basse Terre, 
and assisting the English in expelling the native 
Caribs. The two colonies afterward inevitably quar- 
relled, and expelled each other in turn, with the aid 
of expeditions from Martinique or squadrons from 
England. Finally, after being many times fought 
over and taken and retaken, it settled into the 
possession of the English, who built the immense 
fortification we are now approaching, and which they 
called the Gibraltar of the West Indies. , 

It is on the summit of a hill more than a thousand 
feet in height above the level of the sea, and steeply 
precipitous on three sides. In the rear a steeply 
winding road leads to the top. The road is em- 
bowered with trees and pastured with goats, yoked 
in couples, cattle, and a litter of funny little black pigs. 
The steep sides of the hill are covered with thick 
vegetation, the home, it is said, of a colony of mon- 
keys, but a curious scrutiny failed to detect one of 
their gray faces and sharp beady eyes, peering down 
upon the visitors. The guide offered the time-hon- 
ored legend that they are sometimes caught by 
filling half a pumpkin with toddy, which they par- 
take to the loss of their equilibrium and power of 
locomotion, and only recover their senses, like human 
beings sometimes, behind the bars of a cell; but the 
inexpert traveller declines to vouch for the fact. 



ST. KITTS. 65 

About half-way up the road was defended by a stone 
gateway, now falling- in ruins, and two of the old 
cannon, which defended the fortress, are now sunk, 
muzzle downward, in the earth. At length the ruins 
of the fortress are reached. They are of massive 
gray stone, several acres in extent. On the lower 
floors and beneath the level of the summit were the 
rooms used as barracks, the magazine and officers' 
quarters, communicating by stone galleries, and an 
immense covered cistern, calculated, it is said, to 
hold a seven years' supply of water. Traces of 
whitewash are visible under the sheltering roofs, 
but the rank tropical vegetation has pushed its 
way through the court yard, and trees, flowering 
bushes, and spiny catcus plants spread thick in every 
coign. Crossing an abyss by means of a couple of 
rotten planks, one comes to the stairway, which 
climbs to the top. There, on a wide space, paved 
with blocks of stone and protected on the outward side 
by a parapet, the eye rejoices in a view of exquisite 
variety and beauty. Beneath lies the infinite plain 
of the deep, blue sea, apparently utterly tranquil 
and motionless, but a line of white foam on the far 
stretching beach shows the roll of its never-resting 
swell. The white sails of boats are scattered here 
and there, idly drifting in the calm. Apparently, 
only a few miles off in the lucent air, rises the lofty 
cone of the island of St. Eustatius, in shape like 



66 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Napoleon's cocked hat, and beyond it, in the silvery- 
haze of the horizon, the smaller island of Saba. 
Beneath is the village of Sandy Point, also one of 
the ancient settlements of the island, and on a point 
projecting ont into the sea, the roofs of the cottages 
of the lazaretto, where a hundred or more of miser- 
able lepers from this and the neighboring islands 
are being eaten piece-meal by death in the midst of 
this eternal sunshine, greenery and sea-scented air. 
On the land side the fortress is dominated by the 
summit of Mount Misery, which rises steeply green 
across a fertile valley in whose centre are the smoke- 
stack and buildings of a sugar plantation. The days 
of the Gibraltar of the West Indies have indeed gone 
by, for, even if it had not been abandoned, with guns 
of a modern calibre, it could be easily be pounded 
into a heap of granite blocks from the neighboring 
heights. The top of Mount Misery is clad with a 
turban of fleecy cloud, and here and there in its 
gorges are the dark currents of rain, which in these 
islands may pass within a quarter of a mile, leaving 
the spectator in full sunshine. Seaward to these, 
slender dark curtains of rain 

" Stalk all the horizon round," 

and darken with fleeting shadows the fleecy sky and 
turquoise sea. 
Here, stretched beneath the shadow of the flagstaff 



ST. KITTS. 67 

tower in the airy solitude, the silence made only the 
more impressive by the plaintive chirp of a bird in 
the thicket, one may meditate on the days when this 
fortress was full of military life and animation. When 
the sentries paced the esplanade with Brown Bess 
on the shoulder in the burning sun, when the court 
yard was full of soldiers, and when the gallant 
officers fought the heat with brandy, and dreamed 
of loot in the neighboring Dutch and French islands 
in the fortunate event of a war. And these tranquil 
seas have heard the thunder of the cannon of the 
fleets of Sir Samuel Hood and the Count de Grasse, 
and borne the ships of Horatio Nelson in his fiery 
young manhood. Not to speak of the vessels of the 
buccaneers and " gentlemen of fortune," who flew 
the black flag, and whose exploits and plunderings 
have passed into the mist of oblivion with the winds 
that blew them, there is enough authentic history in 
the West Indies to fill many thrilling volumes. 
Admirals like Cochrane and Sir John Jervis, and 
commanders like Sir Ralph Abercrombie and Sir 
John Moore, have fought desperate battles by sea and 
land for the possession of the Antilles, once so rich 
and coveted, but now so poor and neglected, and many 
a hero, whose name is only preserved in the dusty 
papers of the Admiralty Office, has performed feats 
of desperate courage in cutting out privateers 
or fighting yard-arm to yard-arm with French and 



08 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Spanish, frigates. During the war of 1812, American 
privateers swarmed in these waters, getting rich 
booty from the merchant ships and coasting vessels, 
and exasperating the inhabitants of the islands to 
the verge of distraction. Now many of the inhabi- 
tants of the West Indies see the only future for the 
country in annexation to the United States, and 
would welcome the peaceful advent of the Stars and 
Stripes, accompanied by the avalanche of American 
dollars to rejuvenate the sugar industry. But this 
is only an impossible dream like all the visions of 
the past, which have passed through the mind in 
this hour of lotus-eating. The past cannot be re- 
stored, and the future offers little but a continuance 
of stubborn decay with the shadow of the fecund 
African threatening to cover the land, and build his 
hut amid the ruins of the sugar houses. 

As we ride home the showers chase us before and 
behind. The clear streams that we passed in the 
morning are now muddy torrents, showing that floods 
have gathered in the hills. The streets of Basse 
Terre are full of puddles and beaten into mud by a 
succession of heavy showers. But we have escaped 
and been followed by the friendly sunshine all the 
way. 



IV. 

ST. EUSTATIUS. 

sailing in countky boats — ruins of massive stone 
buildings — artificial prosperity destroyed by 
rodney's swoop — sugar plantations abandoned — 
the golden rock. 

Basse Terre, St. Kitts, Jan. 1, '96. 

The traveller by the little sloops that ply between 
the smaller islands of the West Indies, and wlikh 
are the only means of communication with those 
which are not of importance enough to be visited by 
the steamers, is liable to meet with various experi- 
ences. These boats are. usually of about ten tons 
burden, and are manned almost exclusively by negro 
crews, who are among the best boatmen in the world, 
and sail with sure confidence within a hand's breadth 
of depth in many of the wild storms of these tem- 
pestuous waters. The vessels range as far north as 
St. Thomas, and sometimes even as far south as 
Barbadoes, carrying cargoes of salt and country 
produce, and bringing supplies for the little stores. 
Sometimes the voyage is made under the most de- 



70 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

lightful aspects, with, a fresh and favoring - breeze 
and a clear sky, and it is a keen delight to sweep 
through the dancing seas sparkling with white foam 
crests, with the lee rail awash, the sail bellying full, 
and the cordage singing. The helmsman sits flat on 
the deck, with his strong hand grasping the tiller, 
and his keen eye watching the course of the boat, 
which he guides as skilfully as an accomplished 
jockey does his horse. The flying fish sparkle out 
of the waves and glide in long, easy flight along the 
surface, and the sea birds wheel and cry in the life- 
giving air. Generally the crew, under the impulse of 
the rapid motion and the favoring voyage, improvise 
a concert, with accordeon, tambourine and triangle, 
and some quaint and monotonous melody, which may 
have had its origin in the forests of Africa, rings out 
over the water, and adds a strange, weird note of 
primitive humanity to the voice of the wind and sea. 
At other times it is different. There are head winds 
and baffling calms, in which the boat simply rocks, 
with slatting sails, on the sickening roll of the sea ', 
when the sun pours down with a fiery heat, untem- 
pered by the breeze ; when the crew are sulky and 
silent, and the shortest voyage seems interminable. 
This was my fortune on the first part of the voyage 
to Saba. We left the roadstead of St. Kitts at 3 
o'clock one afternoon in a sloop belonging to Anguilo, 
whose captain had agreed to run me down to Saba, 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 71 

which he hoped to reach the following morning. 
The only other passenger was an elderly black woman, 
who lay upon the deck with all the immobility of an 
animal, the only sign of life being the occasional 
lifting of a skinny arm and a slight change of posi- 
tion. The wind was ahead, and we slowly, very 
slowly, beat up along the coast, taking an infinite 
time to pass a sentinel palm or a landmark point. 
Finally, at sunset, the wind fell almost to a dead 
calm, and we rolled idly about in the water without 
steerage way. 

A refuge in a hard bunk of bare boards in a stifling 
cabin brought a night of nightmare, in which there 
was a constant semi-unconsciousness of the inter- 
minable roll and slat, and a sense of stifling calm 
and heat. In the damp, dewy morning before sun- 
rise there was a grateful sense of coolness in the air, 
but it was soon dissipated as the fiery sun burned 
down upon the sea, which reflected and redoubled 
its heat. We had only reached Sandy Point some 
twelve miles from Basse Terre, and before us rose 
the green and lofty hill of St. Eustatius at about the 
same distance across the channel, with the misty 
mound of Saba on the horizon beyond. No one, 
who has not had the painful experience, can tell 
with what snail-like slowness one makes way in a 
light air toward an object clearly visible, and which 
seems so near. Time and time again the weary eyes 



72 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

were raised toward the green mass with the hope of 
seeing some feature grow more distinct, and some 
sign of actual progress, and as often they fell disap- 
pointed, and the spirit nestles back into what Gen. 
Sherman called intense patience. The perpetually 
shifting sail gave no permanent shade, and the slat- 
ting boom compelled a closely sitting position on 
the deck. The sun became more and more " piking," 
to use the expressive phrase of one of the negro crew,, 
and the heat and immobility began to assume pro- 
portions of acute discomfort. There was nothing to 
eat on board except yams cooked in the hot ashes of 
a box on deck, and the water had a temperature some 
little short of creating steam. Limited reasoning 
powers began to have an influence. It wasn't abso- 
lutely necessary that I should get to Saba on that or 
any other particular day. Next week or next month 
would answer equally well for all practical purposes, 
and here was St. Eustatius under the lee with green 
trees promising shade, and the more or less proba- 
bility of a bath, a comfortable meal and a bed, which 
was not altogether of bare boards. The welcome 
order was given to make for the roadstead. The 
crew got out their sweeps, and by the aid of these 
and occasional puffs of wind, we managed to reach 
the harbor of Orange Town a little after noon. 

As we approached the land, under the steep, high 
bluffs, could be seen the ruins of what were once 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 73 

massive stone building's, walls with gaping- windows 
and piles of tumbled masonry. These were the 
warehouses of the merchants of St. Eustatius, in the 
brief period of its feverish prosperity, when it was 
the neutral port of the West Indies during the wars 
of England, France and Spain, for the possession of 
the Antilles, and to which all the trade, legitimate 
and contraband, was directed. Now they are but a 
quarry for any one to dismantle at will, and many of 
them have sunk into the sea, which has eaten into 
the land with its restless surge. In the roadstead, 
in which two and three hundred ships have been 
counted at a time, there are but a few boats like our 
own riding at anchor. The harbor master came off 
to inspect our papers, for these little islands under 
various jurisdictions, have all their custom houses, 
quarantines and harbor regulations, which often aid 
to the discomfort and delay of travel. We were not 
suspects in coming from an island in plain sight, and 
I was permitted to land. The harbor master oblig- 
ingly took me into his boat, which was rowed by a 
stout negro with muscular arms and trousers rolled 
up to the knees. As we approached the beach he 
paused and backed water until a great roller lifted 
us on its chest. Then he pulled fiercely, and with a 
swirl and rush the boat went high up on the beach, 
where she was seized by the athletic arms of some 
boatmen, who had rushed, knee-deep, into the water, 
and dragged up high and dry. 

7 



74 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Save for the custom's guard house and a few small 
buildings the town of St. Eustatius has retreated to 
the bluff, which is some 300 feet above the beach. 
The winding way is solidly paved with stones, a 
relic of former wealth and enterprise, and crosses a 
bridge constructed of strong and solid masonry, 
which spans a steep ravine, down which, in the rainy 
season, a foaming torrent pours. The Governor's 
house, over which floats the flag of Holland, occu- 
pies the centre, and around it are winding lanes, 
flanked with closely packed houses, some of them of 
solid masonry, but ruined and decayed, and others 
the flimsy wooden structures of a later date. At 
every step there are signs of ruin, of hopeless stag- 
nation and poverty. There is no market place, and 
only a few negresses are to be seen in the corners 
with baskets of vegetables and fruit and wooden, 
platters of fish. Black pigs roam the streets, and 
diminutive donkeys are seen with kegs strung to 
their sides carrying the water from the foot of the 
hill to the houses. The few shops are small and 
poorly furnished, and though there is activity enough 
nobody seems to have anything serious to do. As a 
matter of fact, St. Eustatius is in the last stages of 
decay. Its artificial prosperity was destroyed by 
the swoop of Rodney upon the island and his grand 
loot of all its money and merchandise in 1780, and in 
any event would not have outlasted the period of the 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 75 

wars any more than that of Nassau could have sur- 
vived beyond the end of the blockade running. The 
sugar plantations have been gradually abandoned 
with the depression in the industry, and now this 
rich and fertile island is relapsing into a wilderness. 
The population has shrunk to about 1500 souls, who 
live off the native produce with a little traffic in cat- 
tle, hides and such things as can be sold. AVhether 
the time will ever come when American or English 
capitalists, seeking more profitable investments than 
the overcrowded manufactories shall once more look 
to these fertile islands, and, using improved machin- 
ery and economical methods of culture, shall revive 
the sugar industry, is a problem, which only the 
future can solve. There is little doubt that thej' 
would realize handsome returns, if they should, but 
if they do not, there is apparently nothing for the 
smaller islands but to return to the tropical wilder- 
ness, inhabited only by negroes, who live upon the 
fruits of the earth, and will gradually return to their 
native barbarism. 

Just in the outskirts of the town I found a com- 
fortable house, clean and cool, and embowered in 
vegetation, whose owner was willing to receive me. 
It is needless to say that there is no inn in Orange 
Town, and that the rare visitor is forced to depend 
upon the paid hospitality of some resident. One of 
the greatest luxuries ever invented by humanity is a 



76 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

cool bath after a day of steaming 1 heat, and, cooled 
and refreshed and in his right mind, one can wander 
along a country lane to a convenient tree upon the 
verge of the bluff, and there listen to the never end- 
ing surge rolling against its feet, follow a white sail 
upon the blue expanse and idly watch the green 
lizards that become familiar with your immobility 
and may even race across your feet. It is not thrill- 
ing enjoyment, but very, very grateful after such a 
voyage. Near by rises the massive brown tower of an 
ancient church, whose roof has fallen in, and whose 
bare rafters show like the ribs of a skeleton. The 
tarnished brass plate of the dial no longer marks the 
hours, and shrubs and prickly cacti have overgrown 
the yard. In its massive stone tombs, with circular 
roofs, which for the most part bear inscriptions dat- 
ing back to the last century and before, some of them 
in old high Dutch, which is unintelligible to those 
familiar with the modern language. Thrown close 
beside the wall is a massive grey tombstone, bearing- 
an inscription to the memory of Brigadier General 
Ogilvie of the British army, Avho died in 1781, 
Governor of St. Eustatius and its dependencies. The 
legend has it that when the French captured the 
island the succeeding year they were so embittered 
against his memory that they threw his monument 
out of the church and it has remained ever since 
where it fell, no one having energy or reverence 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 77 

enough to restore it to its place. Of old legends and 
romantic history St. Eustatins is full. Everyone will 
tell you stories of buried treasures, which were hidden 
in the times of the English and French invasions, of 
pots full of broad Joes and pieces of eight, which 
have been unearthed in gardens and cellars, and 
there is undoubtedly more truth in them than in 
most of the stories of hidden treasures — the only real 
golden hoard of pirates being that found by Robert 
Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island. I saw a very 
curious old ring truss found in a pot of buried money, 
and there are still probably some such deposits in 
the earth, although not so many of course, as credu- 
lous tradition would believe. Then there are more 
or less authentic stories of pirates and privateers, 
who were pirates only in name, and who made their 
headquarters in this port, with whose merchants they 
established profitable and friendly relations. The 
last pirate of the Spanish Main, a schooner called 
Las Damas Argentinas, was captured in this port in 
1828, after having plundered an English brig, by a 
British man-of-war, and the crew taken to St. Kitts, 
where twenty-eight of them were duly hanged with 
short shrift and sure cord. 

But the great event in the history of St. Eustatius, 
to which every inhabitant refers with longing and 
grief, was the famous descent of Admiral Sir George 
Rodney, in 1780. When the war with the American 



78 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

colonies broke out, this neutral island was not only 
the headquarters of the American privateers, who 
swarmed in these waters, but the entreport of all the 
great trade which desired to avoid confiscation and 
capture. Commercial intercourse had, of course, been 
forbidden with the revolted colonies, but the West 
India planters were dependent upon them for their 
supplies of meal, bacon and salt fish to feed their 
slaves, and so an immense trade sprang up under the 
shelter of Dutch neutrality. English merchants es- 
tablished themselves here as well as those of other 
nations, and there was a rich colony of Jews, the 
ruins of whose synagogue are still standing, but who 
have since entirely abandoned the impoverished 
island. The island was called the Golden Rock, and 
money was handed about in bueketfulls. The inhab- 
itants naturally sympathized strongly with the re- 
volted colonies, and it is a fact, which every resident 
will impress upon the visitor from the United States, 
that the island government was the first to salute the 
American flag, for which Governor Graaf had some 
difficulty with Rodney previous to the capture of the 
island. Upon some pretext or other, the real motive 
probably being a desire for plunder, England de- 
clared war against Holland, and the news was trans- 
mitted to Rodney. It was the opportunity which he 
had been longing for. He had probably long re- 
garded St. Eustatius as practically an enemy's port, 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 79 

which did uncalculable damage to the British cause 
by supplying the rebels with means and money to 
carry on their struggle, and he was doubtless equally 
willing to punish the British merchants, who were 
trading under a neutral flag, to the advantage of 
the enemy. But the loot, also, was very tempting. 
Rodney, although he won the greatest sea fight in 
English history up to the time of Trafalgar, was not 
a generous man like Nelson. He always had a keen 
eye and a greedy hand for prize money, and St. 
Eustatius promised enough to free him from his debts 
and make him rich forever. He swooped down upon 
it with his fleet, and there was, of course, nothing to 
do but to surrender. Then ensued such a scene of 
plunder as had probably never been witnessed since 
the capture of Panama by the Buccaneers. All the 
goods in the warehouses were seized, regardless of 
the nationality of their owners, and the money looted 
from the banks and tills and the private houses. 
For weeks there was a grand auction of all kinds of 
goods, which were sold to everyone except their 
former owners, and scattered in every direction. In 
spite of the almost nominal prices, the amount of 
plunder reached the enormous sum of three million 
pounds sterling. Among the popular legends of the 
loot is that some of the people endeavored to hide 
their hoards of gold in coffins over which they held 
•solemn obsequies, and conveyed to the tomb. Rod- 



80 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

ney became suspicious of the multitude of funerals 
in a time when there was no pestilence, and ordered 
the coffins to be opened, which added their contents 
to his pile of plunder. In his high-handed greed he 
paid no attention to the claims of English subjects 
to the ownership of goods, and was even accused by 
his gallant subordinate, Sir Samuel Hood, of hiding 
a portion of the plunder in his flag-ship, which he 
never accounted for. But Hood and Rodney were 
not on good terms, and it is difficult to believe that 
so gallant a sailor was guilty of petty crime. It is 
some satisfaction to know that his enormous loot 
brought very little substantial wealth to Rodney. 
He was pursued in the Admiralty courts by the 
British merchants, whose goods he had seized, and 
made to refund such large sums that he died in 
embarrassed circumstances in spite of the pension of 
£2000 a year, which he received for his subsequent 
great victory over De Grasse. Such was the event 
on which all the history of St. Eustatius hinges, and is 
referred to as a calamity, like a hurricane or earth- 
quake, which ended a golden age. But it is obvious 
that the artifical prosperity of St. Eustatius could not 
have outlasted the conditions of war, and that 
Rodney's raid simply anticipated the result of time. 
Since that era its course has been steadily downward, 
until now no profitable industry exists, and it simply 
vegetates in its circle of summer seas. 



ST. EUSTATIUS. 81 

It is a beautiful as well as a fertile island. A 
mountain between two and three thousand feet high 
rises at the southern end, and at its summit is the 
perfectly rounded bowl of the extinct crater, which 
formed it. Beautifully undulating hills occupy the 
rest of the country, and rich valleys invite cultiva- 
tion. Ruins of sugar houses are seen here and there, 
and fields where the cane waved are grown up with 
tropical vegetation. The bold shores are beaten with 
the everlasting surge of the sea, and the trade winds 
sweep across it with life-giving air. It might be a 
garden of productiveness instead of a neglected 
wilderness, and perhaps it may be again in a future 
day. Meanwhile, the philosopher may speculate 
whether the easy, careless life of the negro popula- 
tion, to whom it has fallen, may not be worth more 
in the sum of happiness than all the strife and strug- 
gle for the pursuit of wealth and the creation of 
artificial wants. At least under the shade of a tree, 
in the midst of tropical leaf and flower, and in the 
sound of the murmuring voice of the restful sea, the 
tranquil mind has not much doubt as to its personal 
preference, at least for the time being. 



V. 

AN ISLAND EYKIE. 

The Dutch island of Saba, one of the Leeward 
group of the West Indies, is one of the most peculiar 
spots in the civilized world, and is habited by almost 
as peculiar a people.- It lies eighteen miles north of 
the island of St. Eustatius, and rises like a misty green 
cone out of the turquoise waters of the sea. Its only 
access is by means of the country boats, usually 
sloops of about ten tons burden, which ply between 
the islands with loads of salt, country produce, and 
supplies for the little stores. The West India 
negroes are born boatmen, and it is a lesson in sail- 
ing to travel by one of these crafts. Our crew num- 
bered seven, including the captain, all little active 
young fellows, bare-footed, and with trousers rolled 
up to the knee. As we got under way in the after- 
noon in the roadstead of St. Eustatius, there was as 
much noise as in starting a full-rigged ship. Every 
one was shouting or laughing or echoing the orders 
of the captain to let her pull off and clear the bow- 
sprit of the Little Laurie or to keep her full, and it 
was a pleasure to see the easy grace and activity of 
the men, as they moved about the heeling craft, or 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 83 

climbed the shrouds, hand over hand, without ratlines. 
Their faces had the happy carelessness of animal life, 
and perpetual good humor shone in their bright 
eyes and glittering teeth. There is a charm in the 
African face, when it is not sullen and savage, en- 
tirely independent of the mould of the features, 
when it is associated with the free and natural life of 
the sea and woods, and there were some of our crew 
who had all the grace of active animals in their ex- 
pression and motions. The breeze was fresh and 
steady and, as we swept out into the open sea spark- 
ling and rippling with light foam crests the cordage 
sang and the lee gunwale was often awash. The 
captain abandoned the helm to one of the crew, who 
sat flat on the deck with the tiller in his strong 
hands, and guided the boat as skillfully as an accom- 
plished jockey does his horse. The captain produced 
a gorgeous accordion from the cabin, and seated 
himself on the hatch, while two others brought out 
rude tambourines, and a fourth a triangle. They 
commenced with a rude dance measure with a few 
strongly accented notes, such as might have been 
heard in an African forest, the performers on the 
tambourine showing marvellous ease and skill in the 
alternate touches of their palms and knuckles, and 
the triangle sharply accenting the notes. It set two 
of the crew to dancing on the reeling deck with the 
African hitchings of their haunches and the patting 



84 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

of their hands. Then they broke out into an inter- 
minable song", whose chorus was 

" I wish I was in Demarara 'r'r 
The place where I was born." 

For all the passage the concert was kept up without 
flagging, the captain all the while taking in the course 
of the boat with keen glances and occasionally shout- 
ing an order to him to trim sheet or keep her full. 
Meanwhile the sea sparked in the sunlight, and the 
fresh breeze blew with light and life. Silver flying 
fish darted from the sea and swept along the surface 
in glittering flight. A pelican flew along with the 
heavy beat of its laboring wings, or plunged with a 
splash into the water for a fish. A white gull swept 
around with its wild cry. 

As the sun was sinking yellow as gold in the soft, 
fleecy sky, we drew near to Saba. Its mossy walls 
rose sheer up Wo thousand feet from the sea, which 
beat with a dull roar and a circle of white foam at its 
feet. There was none of the soft green that clothes 
the less rugged West Indian islands, and none of the 
feathery palms to show their slender stems and 
feathery tops against the sky line. On the contrary 
the steep rocks showed bare and brown, and the 
scanty vegetation gave it more the aspect of some 
lonely island of the Hebrides than of the tropic seas. 
A heavy white cloud hung upon its summit, and just 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 85 

below it, so that it was almost touched by the vapor, 
was a nest of little reel-roofed houses in an eyrie of 
the rock. This was St. John, one of the towns of this 
strange island. As we passed along- under the cliffs 
westward in the level glare of the settiDg sun, two or 
three boats were seen anchored off shore, and finally 
we opened out a narrow crevice in the rocks up which 
there was a narrow and winding pathway. There 
was much hallooing to a uniformed negro policeman 
in front of a small wooden guard house, and on the 
promise of a shilling an urchin darted up the path 
like a goat to notify the harbor master of the rare 
event of a passenger desiring to land at Saba. In 
due time he appeared in the shape of a tall bearded 
man, accompanied by a crew of wild-eyed, athletic 
negroes. They dragged a boat down the shingly 
beach, and watching the chance of a strong refluent 
wave pushed off and were soon alongside. A few 
strokes of the oars and a pull up the beach and the 
landing was accomplished. 

The sun was set, but a clear half -moon was shining 
in the sky. In the deep walks of the ravine there 
was a heavy shadow, and the ascent of the nine 
hundred feet of the " Ladder" to the crater had to be 
made in obscurity. The harbor master obligingly 
lent me his little sure-footed pony, who commenced 
to climb the steep steps with all the agility of a goat. 
The ascent went on prosperously for awhile, until at 



86 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

a very high step there was a sudden oscillation in 
the saddle, a very brief sensation of falling, and the 
whack of a solid skull against a still more solid rock. 
After that the climb was made on foot, with occasional 
pauses on a friendly boulder to pant, and the help of 
a stout negro arm up the steepest places. At length 
we emerged into the hollow of what was once the 
crater of the volcano, which created Saba, a veritable 
cup surrounded by steep hills a thousand feet high. 
It was bathed in the soft moonlight and on its level 
bowl was a cluster of white houses with red roofs. 
In one of these, neat with Dutch propriety, with 
rooms that were half verandas with their many 
windows and green jalousies, the weary traveller was 
received with impressive kindness and welcome. 
After a long cool bath and supper the monotonous 
chant of the tree frogs sang him to sleep. 

The island of Saba, the summit of whose cone is 
twenty-two hundred feet above the level of the sea, 
was first settled by the Dutch, in the days when their 
adventurous half moon galleys pushed out over the 
seas in search of lands of spices and sugar, and has 
remained in their possession ever since, except for a 
brief period when Holland was entrained into the 
vortex of the Napoleonic war, and it was taken pos- 
session of by the English. One can imagine what 
courage it took for the early navigators to coast 
around the shores of this forbidding rock in search 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 87 

of an opening- and to climb the steep ravine into the 
unknown interior, and still more hardy must have 
been those who first determined to make a home in 
its silence and isolation. There are no harbors to 
the island, nothing but the open seas sweeping the 
rocks, and at the approach of storms the vessels 
must run for the open seas, or incur the risk of being 
smashed against the frowning shore. For days and 
days the waves beat so heavily against the shore that 
no boat can be launched and live, and the islanders 
are shut out from all communication with the outer 
world as much as if they lived in another planet. 
The present number of inhabitants is about three 
thousand, about two-fifths of whom are negroes. 
The two races are much more distinct than in the 
other West Indian islands, the blacks being black 
and the whites, white. There is also less of the 
caste distinction than is visible elsewhere, and the 
negroes have an air of vigor and manhood suited to 
their independent and primitive life. It is a pleasure 
to see their vigorous and athletic forms, and to watch 
the easy and graceful movements of their limbs of 
steel and sinews of catgut, as they climb the steep 
ladder with great boxes on their heads that would 
weigh down an ordinary man on level ground. It 
has been said that two of them will carry on their 
heads down to the shore a boat built in the crater 
weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, and there is 



88 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

ocular demonstration that they have borne a piano 
safe and sound up the ascent. The whites are now 
mostly of English descent, very few of the old Dutch 
families remaining, although traces of their ways 
and manners still subsist among the people. They 
are all born sailors, and as in Nantucket in the old 
days, all the adventurous young manhood seeks a 
field for labor and adventure upon the ocean. Saba 
captains and Saba sailors man the best-handled 
vessels in the West Indies, and are found in American 
and English vessels of the best quality. Like 
the Nantucketer they have a strong affection for 
their native island, and generally return there in 
their declining years to live on the modest savings 
of their career of adventure. Some of them, like my 
host, Captain Heliger, have commanded great ships, 
and seen the world in all its aspects. They can charm 
the writer with strange tales of adventure, of Nassau 
in the palmy days of blockade running, when gold 
was carried about the streets in buckets, of voyages 
up the Essequibo and other mysterious rivers of 
Guiana, of hurricanes and water-spouts in the Carib- 
bean seas, and wintry storms off Cape Horn, and 
after all that life of achievement and activity they 
are content to pass their days in this tranquil haven 
in the little lakes of a toy estate and the small gossip 
of the neighborhood. Many of the young men 
make voyages of thousands of miles to spend the 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 89 

Christmas holidays at home, or perhaps to be mar- 
ried, and, after a few weeks, to leave their wives for 
an absence of three or four years upon the seas. 

The island literally lives upon the earnings of the 
men who labor in far distant lands and seas, for its 
steep declivities produce no sugar, and its only crops 
are fruits and vegetables of which every other island 
grows a superfluity. There is a rich sulphur mine 
on the westward side of the island, which was once 
very profitable, but the lease has fallen into litigation, 
and it is not being worked. Nevertheless, in spite of 
the lack of visible means of support, the people of 
Saba are apparently much more prosperous and 
thrifty than those of most of the West Indian islands. 
Their houses are all neat and freshly painted, sup- 
plied with comfortable furniture, which is sometimes 
of rich and massive antiquity, and there is an air of 
thrift and comfort about all the ways and manners of 
the people. If there is no wealth there is also no 
poverty, at least which is apparent, and no hand is 
stretched forth in beggary, as is so often the case in 
other West India islands. All the land that it is 
possible to reach with the plough or even with the 
hoe is cultivated, and on hillsides as steep as the roof 
of a house, there are furrows of green planted with 
sweet potatoes and yams. The people, too, are more 
vigorous and healthy, and bear more trace of their 
northern blood than in the lower lying islands. 

8* 



90 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Ruddy cheeks are not uncommon among both, men 
and women, and many of the children are charming 
with rosy faces, fair hair and blue eyes. A prolonged 
old age is very common and venerable patriarchs are 
seen whose years are well toward the century mark, 
and who are still hale and vigorous. Naturally most 
of the people are related to each other by some tie 
of consanguinity, and the population to a great 
extent may be considered as one large family in 
which the joys and sorrows are common to all. 

In the morning the scene is charming. The sun, 
though long risen, is still behind the shoulder of the 
hill, and only a softened light fills the valley. The 
thickly clustered houses of the village are grouped 
around the larger mansion of the governor, from 
whose flagstaff floats the tri-colored pennon of Hol- 
land. The people are busy in their gardens or about 
their houses, and in the deep lanes between the 
massive stone walls negroes are carrying baskets and 
loads of vegetables on their heads. In a great arched 
stone oven a housewife is baking her week's supply 
of bread. The figure of the governor or the doctor 
is seen galloping up a steep lane with a negro groom 
hanging on to the tail of his pony. Far up the steep 
hillside at the edge of the brush are negroes gather- 
ing wood or boys at play, whose shouts echo down 
the valley. A gun on the opposite side rings out with 
a magnified sound and prolonged reverberation. It 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 91 

is perhaps some hunter in pursuit of the wild goats, 
which are to be found in the mountain. Above the 
highest hill-top and in the full glow of the sunlight 
sweeps some great sea-hawk, hardly more than a 
brown speck in the heavens. Amid the flowery 
border of the verandah the brilliant humming birds 
are busy in the deep scarlet blossoms of the hibiscus, 
and other brown birds with a sweet chirping note are 
flitting here and there. All who pass gaze interestedly, 
but not impertinently, at the rare sight of a stranger. 
As the hours wear on the white convolvulus opens, 
one by one ; the full glare of the sun steeps in the 
valley, and the welcome shade of the verandah grows 
deeper. The hours are passed in slow, drifting talk of 
island life, of adventure at sea, and occasional epochs 
of skillfully concocted beverages, with flavors of 
fresh lime and other fascinating and strange in- 
gredients. It is such peace and tranquillity out of 
the world, such rest and lotus eating, as could only 
be enjoyed in this charming island, and earned by a 
struggle up the steps of the Ladder. Evening comes 
on. At four o'clock the sun is hidden behind the 
rim of the opposite mountains, and, while the shade 
has fallen upon the valley, the light patches of cloud 
above the summit shine with the brilliant golden 
glow of day. A walk down to the gap, of which there 
are two in the ascent of the hills, one at the top of 
the ladder, and one at the top of a still steeper and 



92 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

more difficult ascent, brings you to the edge of the 
ocean, which lies before you in an immense blue 
plain, and from which comes the soft, sea-scented 
refreshing wind. Sheer below, it wrinkles against 
the rocks, but no sound of its murmurs reaches the 
ear. 

Upon this eyrie was told the story of the last of 
the pirates of the Spanish Main which has its con- 
nection with Saba,, and is a vital tradition among its 
older people. 

In the middle of August, 1828, an English brig, 
whose name had been painted out on the stern, but 
which could be still made out as the Caraboo, 
anchored at Saba. The crew of eight, who were on 
board, abandoned her, and, taking a small boat, 
sailed for the island of St. Barts. Notice was sent 
to the Dutch commandant of St. Eustatius that the 
brig, which apparently had been plundered, had been 
abandoned at Saba, and she was taken to the road- 
stead of Orangetown, where the president of the island 
and two prominent merchants named Martin, were 
suspiciously active in removing the remaining pack- 
ages, claiming that she was -derelict and that they 
were entitled to salvage. The British commandant 
at St. Kitts, the island next south of St Eustatius, 
heard of the circumstances, and was convinced that 
the brig had been taken and plundered by pirates. 
He sent his aide-de-camp to St. Eustatius with a de- 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 93 

inand for her surrender, which, after some delay and 
tergiversation, was granted. St. Eustatius had been 
from the early years of its history a hot-bed for 
pirates and privateers, in reality little better, although 
•sailing under various doubtful commissions from 
Buenos Ayres, Colombia, and other South American 
republics, and its officials and principal merchants 
were more than suspected of having a share in the 
profits of the trade. The British mail-packet Valor- 
ous, which, like her class in those days, was armed, 
was sent down from St. Kitts to protect the Caraboo 
on her voyage up, and prevent her from being cut 
out by any of the suspicious looking craft, which 
were seen hovering in the channel between the 
islands. Shortly afterward, the British sloop-of-war, 
Victor, arrived at St. Kitts, and was sent to Saba and 
St. Eustatius to investigate the case. Her captain 
found that not only had the Caraboo been taken and 
plundered by pirates, but by skillful questioning, 
obtained a description of a schooner, calling herself 
a Buenos Ayres privateer, which had been fre- 
quently seen in St. Eustatius, and was suspected of 
having committed the crime. On the return, in the 
channel between St. Eustatius and St. Kitts, the 
Victor came upon a schooner bearing the appearance 
of the suspected vessel. She fired a gun to bring her 
to, but the schooner crowded all sail to escape. The 
Victor had the heels of her, and as she rounded to, 



94 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

to deliver a broadside, trie schooner flew Dutch 
colors, which were respected and she was allowed to 
make her way to the roadstead of St. Eustatius. 
When there, she hoisted Buenos Ayres colors and 
was taken possession of by a boat's crew of the 
Victor. She bore the name of Las Damas Argen- 
tinas, and the captain exhibited a commission as a 
letter of marque from the president of Buenos 
Ayres. He was taken on board the Yictor and was 
probably subjected to a rather forcible cross-examina- 
tion, for he admitted that he had captured the 
Caraboo, but claimed that she had a Portuguese 
register, which was absurd on the face of it, as the 
brig was undoubtedly British and would have 
exposed herself to needless risk by sailing under 
false papers. The brig was taken to St. Kitts, and it 
was there learned that she originally hailed from 
Baltimore, and was named the Bolivar. She sailed 
for St. Thomas under American colors and was there 
fitted out as a privateer, under a commission from 
Buenos Ayres, which had probably been made out in 
blank, and sold to the first customer. The captain's 
name was Joseph Loynan Buyran, and he hailed from 
island of Majorica. The crew were mostly Spaniards 
and Portuguese, with a few Americans and Eng- 
glish aboard. They had had a successful cruise, 
having captured an American brig, the Peru, of 
Nantucket, a Spanish and a Portuguese ship, and a 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 95 

Portuguese felucca, which were taken to St. Eustatius 
and plundered, and then sunk ; the cargoes being 
sent to St. Thomas and sold. "Whether the Baltimore 
owners shared a profit in the voyage is not known. 
The prisoners were arraigned before a court con- 
sisting of five commissioners and a jury of the 
inhabitants of St. Kitts. Henry Harrison, the 
quartermaster, and Elisa Merriman, a seaman, were 
admitted as king's evidence. They testified that 
the schooner fell in with the Caraboo off Gibraltar, 
and Captain Cook was thunderstruck when informed 
that his vessel was a prize. He and his crew were 
taken on board the schooner, but not subjected to 
any violence or personal plundering. Captain Buy- 
ran was evidently a somewhat gentlemanly pirate. 
Off Lazarote, one of the Canary islands, the cap- 
tured crew were put into a heavily laden boat, and 
sent to make their way on shore. As an evidence 
of his gentlemanly feeling Captain Buyran pre- 
sented Captain Cook with the sum of $20 as some 
compensation for the loss of his cargo valued at 
$28,000. The men in the over-laden boat had great 
difficulty in making their way to land, and would 
hardly have done so but for the people on shore, 
who saw their labored progress and went out to 
their assistance. 

Captain Buyran asked to be tried separately and 
his request was granted. He defended himself by 



96 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

the production of his commission as a privateer, and 
claimed that his gift of $20 to Captain Cook was a. 
proof that he was no pirate. " Pirates," he said, " did 
not do such things," which on the whole was a reflec- 
tion on the memory of Captain Roberts, and others of 
the more generous of the " gentlemen of fortune," who 
had been known to give a vessel they did not want 
to the unfortunate commander of one which they 
did, and hand over to him a share of his own pro- 
visions. In spite of this plea Captain Buyran was 
duly convicted of piracy upon the high seas and 
sentenced to be hanged. Ninety of his crew were 
summarily convicted and sentenced the next day. 
Honorio Jose, the Portuguese cook, was acquitted 
on his evidence that he had been forced to serve 
against his will, and Pepe Gonzaley, a Spanish boy r 
on account of his youth and unresponsibility. Peter 
Cooper, a lieutenant of the schooner, and William 
Ogle, the cabin-boy, were shown to have protested 
against the capture of the Caraboo, and recommended 
to mercy. Neile McNeill, an American, was sick 
during the voyage, and had taken no part in its work. 
He was a smith and had been at work at St. Thomas, 
when he had got into debt, and as the Danish law 
allows imprisonment for debt, he had shipped and 
taken the advance pay to satisfy his creditors. As 
soon as he found out the character of the vessel he 
either fell sick or shammed sickness to escape re- 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 97 

sponsibility. It would not appear that be was at all 
culpable, but he and five others, who had been 
shipped at the Canary island after the capture of the 
brig and were guiltless t>i any act of piracy, were only 
acquitted on the condition that they would serve for 
five years on a British man-of-war. 

One of the notable characters among the pirate's 
crew was an American named Alfred Cooper, who 
served as a lieutenant on the schooner. He was one 
of that singular type of adventurers and desperadoes, 
whom an untameable restlessness and recklessness 
drive out into the world, and whose careers contain 
more extraordinary incidents than the most extrava- 
gant romancer would dare to invent. They are still 
to be found in the waste places of the earth, in the 
South seas, on the western frontier, or wherever there 
is strife and adventure, and their careers are some- 
times marvellous in the contrasts between their birth 
and up-bringing and their lives and deaths. More 
than one could say in the language of the old Scottish 
ballad : 

" O ! little did my mammy ken 

The day -she cradled me. 
The land I was to travel in, 

The death I was to dee." 

This Cooper had been to the East Indies in his 
youth, and in some freak of waywardness or in some 
perilous adventure among the infidels, had become a 



98 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Mohammedan and stuck to his new faith. While his 
companions weakened at the prospect of death, and 
sought comfort and consolation in the hopes and 
promises of the minister, who visited them in their 
cells, Cooper remained sullenly obdurate aud de- 
fiantly declared himself a believer in the Koran. 
The captain was very indignant at the conduct of the 
quartermaster, Harrison, who had turned king's evi- 
dence, and expressed the hope that, although he had 
escaped punishment on earth, he would find it in 
hell, but being informed by the clergyman that his 
one chance of salvation depended upon a better 
frame of mind, he forgave him, doubtless with a 
mental reservation that things would have been 
different if the clutch of the law had not been quite 
so potent. 

The first batch of the prisoners, including the 
captain, were executed the second day after the 
trial. They were taken out of the jail and placed 
in a cart, which was escorted in front and rear by 
detachments of troops from the garrison and the 
island militia. The place of execution was a level 
green meadow at the east of the town, at the end of 
the row of fishermen's huts, which stretched along 
the beach. It is surrounded by an amphitheatre of 
hills and faces the blue waters of the bay. As the 
procession started the big gun of the pirate schooner, 
which was anchored in front of the place of execu- 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 99 

tion, was fired with solemn boom at minute intervals, 
and continued until all was over. The broadside of 
the Victor was trained on the scene, and her crew 
were in the boats. The crowd were hushed and 
nothing was heard but the loud prayers of the crimi- 
nals and the booming of the heavy gun until the 
drop fell and the row of human beings hung limp in 
the sunshine. When Cooper came to be executed 
the following day, true to his desperate character, 
he fought the executioner, who was a gigantic and 
savage negro, who had been pardoned for some crime, 
on condition that he would perform the office. The 
negro swore at his victim, while he was dragging him 
to the drop, and the scene was sickening. Thus 
ended the last of the pirates of the Spanish Main, 
and, although the proceedings, to our view, savor 
somewhat of summary and rough and ready prompt- 
ness, there is no doubt that substantial justice was 
done. Thereafter there were no more Buenos Ayrean 
privateers haunting the Antilles. The cook, Honorio 
Jose, lived for a long time in Basse Terre, becoming 
demented in his old age, and wandering about the 
streets singing fragments of songs, and living upon 
charity. The descendants of the boy, Pepe Gon- 
zaley, are still living in the island. 

My visit to Saba was at Christmas time. At four 
o'clock, in the still, dark morning, whose air was 
burdened and sweetened with the heavy scent of 



100 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

tropic flowers, young 1 voices were heard singing" 
carols in the street, as if it were in an English 
village. The celebration of the day was entirely 
decorous in Saba, and there was none of that mas- 
querading, drumming, parading and " gumbic " 
dancing, which, in other West Indian islands, fills the 
streets with barbaric noise and merriment during the 
entire week from Christmas to New Year's day. 
The people, neatly dressed, wended their way 
decorously to the pretty little English church, which 
was profusely decorated with flowers and palms 
which would have cost a fortune in a colder land, 
but which were here the free gift of nature. The 
whites and blacks sat together without distinction, 
and colored young ladies sang in the choir beside 
their fairer sisters. The sermon was such as might 
have been heard in an English village church, and 
the only slight surprise was the invocation in behalf 
of our sovereign and gracious lady, Wilhelmina, 
instead of Yictoria, whose name has come to seem a 
part of the service. 

One of the many original characters of Saba is old 
Jubilee, a negro, a haunter of the woods and solitary 
places by an instinct of nature like an Indian. He 
was born a slave on the island of St. Barts, and had 
been a butler in the house of a gentleman, where he 
had doubtless learned his polite and deferential 
manners. But after emancipation he had betaken 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 101 

himself to the solitude of the Saba hills, which he 
haunted like a wild animal. He was sixty-eight 
years of age, but still capable of climbing to the sum- 
mits of the highest and steepest hills. In his sharp 
eyes was the keenness and quickness of vision of a 
wood-bird, and his quiet movements had all the ease 
of one to whom the tangled woodland was an open 
path. His words were few, but the kindly smile of 
his weather-worn face was companionship. He was 
accompanied by a little brown dog, with the sharp 
muzzle, the keen eyes, and the cocked ears of a fox. 
He was friendly to the stranger, but all his eyes and 
ears were given to his master with a dumb affection 
and intelligence touching to see. They were com- 
panions, and doubtless had a closer understanding 
than many human beings, whose touch of compre- 
hension is so dulled with the dust of conventional 
speech. The woods of Saba are not the profuse and 
tangled growth of the lower-lying islands, but many 
of the tropical trees and shrubs grow in them, like 
the lemon and coffee trees, and the ferns, if not 
gigantic, are delicate and beautiful. All the rare 
plants Jubilee knew and detected on the instant, as 
well as the roots and simples of savage medicine, and 
he would unearth with the point of his stick some 
point of rock showing glittering quartz or some 
strange conglomerate of lava fusions, whose rarity 
he knew, but of whose value he was ignorant, al- 

9* 



102 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

though hopefully credulous that it might contain 
some precious mineral. There are no poisonous 
snakes in Saba like the terrible fer de lance of Mar- 
tinique and St. Lucia, and the coral snake of Trini- 
dad, and one wanders in the woods without fear of 
disturbing anything more dangerous than a scuttling 
lizard. The little birds are mostly silent, or only give 
faint chirping notes like dwellers in solitary places 
oppressed by the silence. There are many beautiful 
and delicate flowers in Saba, some that stream over 
the walls in blue and white, and others that hide 
shyly under the leaves, and only show when a stray 
glint of sunshine penetrates the branches and illumi- 
nates them to a crimson spark. At length, after a 
climb in no way entitled to rank among feats of 
mountaineering, but which makes the muscles quiver 
and the lungs pant, one arrives at a summit which 
commands a view of the vast ocean. The sensation 
of height is greater than that on many a loftier peak, 
for being in the infiniteness of the azure and sur- 
rounded by the infinite sea. The fresh wind blows, 
tempering the heat of the golden sunshine. Nothing 
is visible on the horizon but the hill of St. Eustatius, 
and the eye vainly searches in the blue distance for 
the white spot of a sail. It is all airy height and 
infinite vastness. 

Not all the inhabitants of Saba live in the crater. 
There are clusters of cottages perched here and 



AN ISLAND EYRIE. 103 

there in eyries of the hills, and on the windward side, 
so-called, from the steady prevalence of the trade 
winds, there is a considerable village perched on a 
steep declivity. Here the winds blow, and when the 
hurricanes rage it must seem to all but the hardened 
dweller on the rocks that the slight habitation must 
be swept off into the air. But here they live and 
remain, apparently as fast as limpets to a rock. In 
the crater the people are sheltered from the hurri- 
canes, except when they sweep in through one gap, 
and then, circling round in their revolving course, 
penetrate by the other, but at their worst they are 
nothing like the tempests to which those on the 
windward side are exposed. 

If a voyage by boat in the Caribbean sea by 
day is charming, by night, in pleasant weather, it 
is magic. The men, like animals, go to sleep at 
sunset. They lie stretched across the hatch or about 
the deck, face downward, or on their backs, sleeping 
profoundly. Only the barefooted steersman sets 
vigilant at the tiller. The fresh breeze fills the sail, 
and the rush of the water so near has a sound of 
whispering companionship. The great stars sparkle 
in the heaven twice as large and twice as brilliant as 
in the colder and greyer skies, while the moon now 
pours forth a flood of splendor and now veils her 
face in a floating wreath of translucent vapor. Mile 
after mile we slide through the gently heaving sea, 



104 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

until at length we begin to coast the darkly wooded 
shores of St. Kitts, whose lofty hills are cut sharp 
against the sky. Off Sandy Point we are hailed 
by the coast-guard boat, and made to heave to. 
All is bustle and excitement as the sleeping crew 
spring to their feet and bellow and bawl as the 
guard boat is pulled along side. We have no 
freight but a bundle of dried goat skins, and, after 
a rummage in the hold, are allowed to pass on. It 
is one of the vexations of West India travel that 
these little islands of various jurisdictions have all 
their custom-houses, and quarantines, and their 
harbor regulations, which do not permit landing 
after sunset without special trouble. As we sail 
along, almost in the shadow of the shore, lights 
twinkle here and there in the cabins, and the monoto- 
nous thump, thump of a negro drum and the livelier 
beat and roll of a tambourine gives a weird note of 
strangeness to the scene of woods and tropic sea. 
At length the lights of the vessels in the roadstead 
of St. Kitts twinkle in the distance and the colored 
beacon on the pier shines like a red spark. We 
whistle to revive the lagging wind, and at length 
down goes the anchor in the still waters and the sails 
are furled. 



VII. 
NEVIS. 

IN A PALM GROVE— A LITTLE JOURNEY INTO GINGER 
LAND— DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE NEGRO AND MIXED 
RACES — AN OLD PLANTATION DANCE — RUDE AFRICAN 
MELODIES. 

Basse Terre, St. Kitts, January 11, 1896. 

One of the pleasantest spots in the little island of 
Nevis is the palm grove on the beach beside the 
town. At early dawn there is a dewy freshness in 
the air, which is most delightful. The wide stretch 
of the sea before you is soft and gray, with a vapory 
light, and faint curls of mist rest upon its surface. 
The long, slow surges roll up the sand with a dull 
and melancholy roar, as if in the lassitude of their 
strength. The slender trunks of the palms rise 
straight and tall and gray, and the great leaves of 
their umbrella tops rustle in the faint wind with a 
voice which is not like the soft sighing of the pines, 
but louder and more accentuated, but still not harsh, 
and full of strange whisperings and unknown tropical 
speech. 

The people are already astir. About the negro 



106 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

cabins in the grove the women are busy over their 
fires, whose smoke rises in the air and touches the 
nostril with a pleasant, acrid smell, as of strange 
woods and leaves. The breakfast of yams and fried 
fish will soon be ready. An old woman comes out 
leaning heavily on a staff and extends a skinny hand 
with a request for a penny to buy bread, which she 
evidently needs, for her days of active work have 
long been over. Children gather about to stare with 
smiling wonderment at the strange visitor. Men 
come down with the heavy burdens of nets on their 
shoulders, which they stretch in long rows on the 
poles to dry. A young negro lad goes dashing by 
on a fiery young horse, which he is taking down for 
its morning bath. He is without a saddle, but clings 
easily to the animal, which is furious with vigor and 
activity, and his white teeth shine with enjoyment as 
the beast darts past and ploughs up the firm sand 
with his hoofs in a mad career away along the cres- 
cent shore. The waves take on a darker shade 
and sparkle in the warmer light. Some great fish 
splashes up the surface with a heavy plunge, and far 
off on the horizon there is a spiral of vapor, where a 
whale is disporting his huge hulk in the sea. A boat 
comes pulling in, whose crew have been out to the 
fish traps, and are bringing in their catch. As it 
touches the beach they spring barelegged into the 
surf and drag it high up on the sand. Its bottom is 



NEVIS. 107 

full of fish of all strange shapes and colors, long, 
slender snake-like fish with sharp snouts, dumpy red 
ones, and others blue, green and orange, and all the 
colors of the rainbow, with huge bellies and gro- 
tesque shapes as strange as their colors. The boat 
is soon surrounded with eager women, who come 
trooping through the grove with baskets or wooden 
platters on their heads, who eagerly chaffer with 
much noise and chattering for the supply, which 
they will take home to the market. A few pence 
will fill the basket or the platter, and a breakfast can 
be bought for a copper or even a half penny. Fish 
is almost the exclusive diet of the poor people, and 
with a baked yam and sugar cane to gnaw the negro 
keeps fat and happy. Meanwhile the sun has risen 
at your back and begins to send its level spears of 
light under the trees and search out the shadows. 
The night vapors have vanished from the sea, and 
the waters are now deeply blue and sparkling in the 
sunshine. The line of the woods sweeps darkly 
green around the crescent of the shore to the point, 
where there are the ruins of the old fort, now dis- 
mantled and grass-grown, which once watched like 
a sentinel over the safety of the island against some 
buccaneering raid or Spanish or French surprise. 
You can walk for miles along the firm sand of the 
beach, listening to the roar of the ocean, and absorb- 
ing the sweet air of the tropics, until the sun gets 



108 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

high enough to reach your unprotected head, and 
then your unethereal nature will remind you that it 
is time to think of a West Indian breakfast. 

On the windward side of Nevis, which is a perma- 
nent point on all these islands on account of the steady 
current of the trade winds, is the settlement called 
Ginger Land, why, no one seems to know. The road 
leads past the old stone hotel and hot bath which 
once made Nevis the Saratoga of the West Indies, 
and is a gradual ascent until the windward declivity 
is reached. On the left is the lofty, conical moun- 
tain, which dominates the island from its centre, and 
whose darkly green sides slope up to a sharp peak 
on whose summit there is always a wreath of white 
cloud. On either side are fields, some waving and 
rustling with thick cane, and others bare and black, 
in which men and women are working with heavy 
hoes. At one spot across the fields and crowning a 
ridge is a long row of the beautiful cabbage palms, 
showing their slender stems and feathery tops against 
the darker green of the mountain side. At a turn in 
the road we come upon the ruins of a great stone 
mansion, bare and desolate, with its eyeless windows 
boarded up. On the hill behind it rises the tower ctf 
the windmill, still intact, with its huge arms motion- 
less in the air. The sugar-boiling house is a thorough 
ruin with the roof fallen in, but one curious stone 
building attracts the attention. Narrow slits in the 



NEVIS. 109 

walls scarcely more than inch wide serve as windows, 
and in the semi-darkness of the interior it seems a 
stone cell in which refractory slaves may have been 
thrust, waiting- for their turn at the whipping 1 post in 
the morning. It may have been only a toolhouse, 
but it looks marvelously like a prison, and the stories 
of the discipline on the slave estates by no means 
forbid the conjecture. A great square stone tank 
sunk in the ground is still full of water, but the 
house and buildings are empty and abandoned. 
Some of the fields are grown up, but others are 
being cultivated in small patches by the negroes, 
whose huts and cabins are scattered about. In 
Nevis, more than in many of the islands, the negroes 
have acquired little pieces of ground of their own 
from the abandoned plantations, which they cultivate. 
Their huts, too, are more neat and better kept than 
in other islands, and one sometimes sees a flower 
garden embowered with roses and other brilliant 
blossoms, showing signs of a taste rare among the 
negro population. Along the road were women and 
men trudging to and from town with burdens on their 
heads, and now and then a man on horseback, or 
bestriding a donkey so diminutive that he had to 
lift his feet to keep them from dragging on the 
ground. All were respectful, the women said their 
soft " Good m-a-a-ning, sir," and the men touched 
their hats. 



110 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

At length the road began to descend, and the rows 
of cabins to thicken along the roadside. There were 
little shops where the shoemaker was seen at his last 
and the smith welding a shoe at his forge. There 
were little groceries and little bake shops, so tiny as 
to have barely room for the counter. By the roadside 
was the rude and ugly Wesleyan chapel, and farther 
on a large schoolhouse with a multitude of children 
on the benches under the supervision of a magisterial- 
looking black man. At the end of the settlement 
was the large and quaint-looking Angelical church, 
with a neglected grave-yard about it, and marble 
tablets on the inner walls expressing the virtues of 
departed parishioners. From here was a magnificent 
panorama of the sea, blue and sparkling in the sun- 
shine, with Rotunda Rock, one of the many curious 
islets of these waters, rising dome-like from the 
surface, and the island of Monserrat lying like a 
misty cloud on the horizon. The steady trade wind 
blew and stirred among the trees, and swept a 
delightful coolness across the cheeks. 

The population of Ginger Land is now almost 
entirely black, not colored, for it is always important 
to recognize this distinction in the West Indies be- 
tween the negro and mixed races. Nevertheless, it 
was colonized in the old days by a colony of Shakers, 
whose white representatives have now entirely dis- 
appeared. The religion, however, took a firm hold 



NEVIS. . Ill 

in the community, and although its tenets have 
perhaps entirely vanished, or exist only in some 
strange travesty, the habits of worship in dancing 
with an added African fervor, still persist, in spite 
of the efforts of the Angelican and Wesleyan clergy- 
men to eradicate them. It is a strange survival, 
much more so than the Obeah worship, which was 
naturally transmitted from Africa, and is adapted to 
the negro character even under the varnish of edu- 
cation, which some of them have. Obeah is still 
practiced, to a very considerable extent, in Nevis, 
although not under such revolting forms as in Hayti, 
and there are many old women and old men who 
support themselves by preying upon the credulity of 
the country people. It is strictly prohibited by law, 
but maleficent charms, philters and medicines are 
sold without any particular secrecy, and the rheu- 
matic negro has much more faith in the incantation 
of some Obeah man, who draws pieces of glass and 
lizards from the painful limb, than in the prescrip- 
tions of the regular doctor. A man who should find 
a cock's head before his door, or a dead lizard in a 
bottle, would be surely convinced that he was be- 
witched, and might even die under the influence of 
the possession as certainly as he had previously been 
cured from some disease under the influence of his 
faith in the potency of an Obeah charm. 

It is now somewhat difficult to obtain a sig-ht of one 



112 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

of the old-time plantation dances, such as were prac- 
ticed in the slave days, aud whose originals are still 
to be seen on the banks of the Congo. The younger 
people have adopted the fashionable quadrille and 
waltz, and, although they dance them at times with 
a strong African flavor, they preserve the movements 
and measures of the ball-room. It is only in the 
remote country districts that the people sometimes 
gather in the evening and indulge in one of the 
ancient dances to the music of the drum and tam- 
bourines, and the chorus of "Baudoula, Baudoula," 
or " Kooma, little boy, rooma till the morning." One 
such event took place at a collection of huts on an 
abandoned plantation in Nevis, which I was privi- 
leged to witness through the influence of my negro 
guide and factotum. 

It was a moonless night, and although the skies 
were thickly covered with bright constellations, they 
did not afford light enough to illuminate the heavy 
shadows of the tropical night. The guide carried a 
lantern, whose light flashed and quivered over the 
green bushes, and showed the stumps and stones 
after you had stumbled over them. It is quite a 
stiffish climb for a mile or two along narrow and 
little-used paths among the brushwood. The tree- 
frogs kept up their shrill and noisy chant on every 
side, and there was occasionally a strange scattering 
in the bushes, as though nocturnal rat or snake had 



NEVIS. 113 

been disturbed by the footsteps. At length there was 
the sign of the red light of a fire in a nook in the 
hillside, and the monotonous sound of a drum was 
heard in the still air. 

The collection of huts, some four or five in number, 
was grouped around a silk cotton tree, whose gnarled 
branches covered an immense area. Under this and 
illuminating its brown trunk with flashes of light was 
a bright fire made of dried cane and leaves, not for 
heat, but for illumination. The musicians were 
seated in the semi-darkness of the shade, and were 
four in number, an old man who played with his 
fingers on the head of a drum constructed from a 
hollow tree, two men with tambourines and a small 
boy with a triangle. They had been merely practic- 
ing before our arrival, and the dance had not com- 
menced. On the news of the advent of the white 
visitor the men and women and a group of children 
of all ages gathered about him, and looked at him 
with kindly curiosity and good humor. They were 
evidently flattered with the idea that a stranger 
should want to see them dance, and lent themselves 
kindly to the performance. It was not long before 
the children were scattered to one side, from whence 
they looked with glittering eyes, the light shining on 
their ebony faces. The music struck up a monoto- 
nous air, and a man and a woman took their places 

on a cleared spot of ground. They moved slowly at 

10* 



114 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

first, with much affectation of dignity and elaborate 
bowings and courtesies. Soon, however, the music 
grew livelier, and they began to accentuate their 
movements with the patting of hands and the tap- 
pings of bare heels on the ground. Their haunches 
twisted, and they sprang higher and higher in the 
air, advancing upon each other so as to lightly touch 
their stomachs together and retreating with a back- 
ward bound. The music grew louder and faster, 
and the full enthusiasm of a wild African dance 
took possession of them. Their movements grew 
almost frenetic, and the perspiration dripped from 
their ebony faces. All at once they broke out into 
a chant, whose measure was accented by the clapping 
of hands, and in which all the spectators joined. It 
was an utterly rude melody, but somehow had a 
fascination in its monotony and its wild, high notes. 
This was the song, utterly unintelligible at the time, 
but afterward obtained from one of the performers : 
"I went to Long Hall well : 

I meet Seeago Day. 

I ask her to lend me the bucket — 

The bucket to draw little water — 

The water to boil little junfy 

The junfy to go on me belly. 

O, yaw, O, yaw, O yaw, 

Knock me kenaw — 

O, yaw, knock me kenaw 

Come in, yaw, 

Den me knock your kenaw." 



NEVIS. 115 

" Junfy " signifies the Indian meal with which the 
plantation negroes were fed in the slave days, and 
to " knock me kenaw " was an invitation to touch 
stomachs together, which was so frequent a move- 
ment in the dance. There were a number of other 
verses to the chant equally meaningless, and the 
mere development of some current phrase in the 
same fashion. Meanwhile the children were not the 
least amusing part of the spectacle. They were 
thoroughly infected with the spirit of the music, and 
all danced and bobbed and jogged together, down 
to the smallest tot, who could hardly stand on his 
little brown legs, with indefatigable activity and in 
perfect time to the music. Their little faces shone 
with perspiration and delight, their beady eyes 
glistened, and their teeth glittered in a silent laugh 
of enjoyment. When the first performers became 
tired or had danced their time, for they seemed 
absolutely indefatigable, they were succeeded by 
others, and sometimes four or six were dancing at a 
time to apparently the same measure, and if the 
chant differed in words, its rhythm was the same. 
One old man with grey hair showed as much activity 
as the younger ones, and hopped and capered with 
even greater variety to the palpitations of his heels 
and the grotesqueness of his movements. 

There was absolutely nothing indecent about the 
dance, nothing but an exhibition of animal good 



116 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

humor and possession of the spirit of music. It is 
perhaps very different when a number of negroes 
are collected together for an orgy, and their spirits 
are brutalized with new rum. Then, possibly, scenes 
are exhibited, whose appropriate place would be the 
kraal of some barbarous tribe in Western Africa. 
On such occasions the white visitor would not be 
welcome, and possibly not very safe. But those 
orgies are becoming very rare, and are only the in- 
heritance of the bad old days of slavery, when the 
negroes were treated as brutes and acted as such in 
their few hours of relaxation. Now, although religion 
and education have still a great deal to do in the 
West Indies before the negro can be ranked as ap- 
proaching a European standard of civilization, they 
have succeeded in putting down such barbarous ex- 
hibitions as used to take place, and which are now 
extremely rare. As has been said, the younger 
negroes, especially in the towns, are ignorant of the 
old plantation dances, and would consider themselves 
as degrading their standard of gentility by practicing 
them. The dance which I saw was chiefly an ex- 
hibition got up for my benefit and, although genuine 
in its way, and, when begun, fully entered into by 
the performers, it was doubtless a somewhat artificial 
relic of ancient days. In a few years even such an 
exhibition as that would be impossible in Nevis, as it 
would be now in many of the islands, and the old 



NEVIS. 117 

songs and the old dances will be succeeded by " After 
the Ball," or its successor in popularity, and by the 
waltz a trois temps. At least this will be the case if 
the islands do not drift backward, instead of moving- 
forward, as many fear, and pure barbarism, brush off 
the veneer of civilization and education, which it now 
wears. In that case the Obeah man may rule as he 
does in Hayti over orgies as wild and cannibal as 
those of the aboriginal Caribs. But it is to be hoped 
that a better future awaits these fair and lovely island 
gardens of the sea. 



VII. 
SAN MAETIN. 

THE TOWN OF GREAT BAY AND ITS EXTENSIVE SALT 
POND — MARIGOTS ONLY FORTRESS — THE FRENCH AND 
THE DUTCH QUARTER — POISONED FISH — AMERICAN 
LOAFERS. 

Basse Terre, St. Kitts, Feb. 4, 1896. 

The island of San Martin, partly Dutch and partly 
French, is one of the lesser Antilles, lying to the 
north of St. Kitts. During the salt picking season 
it is sometimes visited by American and English 
steamers, but during the greater part of the year the 
only means of communication is by the small sloops 
that ply between the various islands. We had a 
beautiful voyage. We left the roadstead of St. 
Kitts about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and skirted 
along the green and glowing shores, with their fringe 
of palm trees and their sugar plantations stretching 
up to the sides of the mountains, whose tops were 
veiled in white and shifting clouds. The fresh breeze 
blew and the turquoise sea sparkled in light. As we 



SAN MARTIN. | 119 

passed out into the channel between St. Kitts and St. 
Eustatius, the boat heeled over to the breeze until the 
water foamed over the lee rail and darted through 
the waters like a flying 1 fish. Now and then a drizzle 
of rain would drop from some fleecy cloud appar- 
ently not bigger than a pocket handkerchief, and add 
a freshness to the spicy air. At dusk we were off the 
beach of Orangetown, in St. Eustatius, where some 
bags of mail were dumped on board amid the usual 
shouting and guffawing of the negro boatmen. Then 
began the magic of a night voyage in the tropics. 
The golden twilight faded into the darker beauty of 
the night lit by the great brilliant stars, with a 
horned moon of silver purity hanging in the sky. 
The breeze sang and the waters hissed and gurgled 
in our swift course. The helmsman sat flat upon the 
deck and pulled the tiller with a skill and ease that 
never missed a point of the course, and a silent 
sailor trimmed the sheet as every now and then the 
helmsman uttered some guttural interjection. The 
rest of the crew were stretched about the deck, flat 
upon their faces, sleeping profoundly, or occasionally 
rising to light one of the long native cigars at the 
glowing brazier and smoke in silence. Hour after 
hour glided on, and there was absolutely no temp- 
tation to leave the magic scene for the hard bunk 
below, even though it had been thoughtfully gar- 
nished with a clean sail as a luxury for the sybaritic 



120 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

traveller. At 10 o'clock we dropped anchor in the 
harbor of Great Bay, surrounded with dark hills, 
and with the red light on the pier head shining in 
the darkness. Boatmen were awaiting the arrival 
of the sloop, and the kindly landlady of the only 
lodging-house on the island was aroused to admit us 
to clean and sweet repose. 

The town of Great Bay in the Dutch part of San 
Martin lies between the harbor and an extensive salt 
pond in the rear, which creates the industry of the 
island, and makes it more prosperous than its de- 
cayed and impoverished neighbor. During the three 
dry months in the year it is a scene of great activity, 
the women trooping in from the country to pick 
the salt, and the bagging, grinding and storing 
giving employment to the resident population. Now, 
however, the ponds were simply a flat sheet of 
whitish water crossed with slender lines of dams 
and dykes, and only the piles of weather stained 
salt on the shore showed their product. The ware- 
houses and shops along the principal street were of 
a more substantial character than in most of the 
small West India islands, and there were signs of a 
commercial prosperity very grateful to witness after 
the spectacles of poverty and decadence elsewhere. 
But it was the dull season, and no one seemed to 
have anything particular to do beyond the usual 
avocation of a West Indian town. From early 



SAN MARTIN. 121 

morning the streets were filled with negro women 
with baskets of fruit, vegetables and fish on their 
heads looking for purchasers or standing in noisy 
gossip with each other. The negro boatmen lounged 
about the pier or smoked their long cigars in the 
shade of the little wooden custom-house. The uni- 
formed policemen sat on benches under the shade of 
the trees in the court-house yard, and the idea that 
their guardianship could possibly be required seemed 
absurd. 

The events of the day were hardly more impor- 
tant than the watching of flies upon the wall. One 
morning there was a bustle on the wharf, and a poor 
creature was lifted out of a boat and taken, feebly 
moaning, in a litter made of a fishing net, to the 
hospital. He was suffering from eating poisoned 
fish, and died a few hours afterward. He had eaten 
of the barracouta, a fish which is ordinarily whole- 
some, but which, from some unknown cause, some- 
times becomes poisonous, producing a dimness of 
vision and a loss of hearing, accompanied by a painful 
itching, even when not fatal as in this case. Some 
attribute the poison to its frequenting a copper bank 
in the waters off St. Eustatius, and others to its feed- 
ing upon some noxious sea plant, but under all circum- 
stances it is to be regarded with suspicion. The poor 
fellow, who died, had been stupidly quarantined 
for twenty-four hours on a sloop flying the yellow 



122 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

flag in the harbor, whereas, if he had been promptly 
brought on shore and given medical attendance, he 
might have recovered. The quarantine regulations 
between the West India islands of various nationali- 
ties are sometimes very capricious and arbitrary, and 
the traveller who has come with a clean bill of health 
from some neighboring port may find himself com- 
pelled to roast for days in the harbor under the 
yellow flag from some causeless alarm of the medical 
authorities, although, perhaps, an excess of precau- 
tion is not to be condemned, when Yellow Jack is 
liable to make his appearance at any time, as recently 
at Antigua arid Martinique. 

Among the wanderers in the streets of Great Bay 
were a couple of Americans, shabby and disreputable 
types of the shiftless adventurers Avho are occasion- 
ally to be found wandering about these islands, the 
plague of the consuls and a nuisance to the people. 
They were not long in introducing themselves with 
tales of distress, which had the familiar accent of 
the importunate street loafer. They had been in 
Guadaloupe, they said, working about the machinery 
of some sugar factory, although their certificates of 
engineers would probably not entitle them to rank 
above the grade of firemen. They had come to San 
Martin by the charity of the captain of some schooner, 
or been shipped off by the consul in order to get 
rid of them, and were living on the half-contempt- 



SAN MARTIN. 123 

uous charity of the colored people, who were, 
perhaps, glad to find white loafers at their own level, 
with whom they could be familiar. As usual, they 
wanted the assistance of the consul to get somewhere 
else, where they Avould be equally idle and equally 
useless, and in the meantime would be grateful for a 
little money to buy food with, which, being inter- 
preted, meant rum. It is to be said for the West 
India islands as a resort for tramps, that here, at 
least, they are not run in by the police or made to 
saw wood for their lodgings in the station-houses ; 
they are not in danger of suffering from the cold, 
and the negroes will readily give them of their fish 
and yams. But to receive the charity of a race, who 
are accustomed to regard the white man as a superior 
being, must be a trial to all but the most indurated 
callousness, and they can only get from one island 
prison to another by making themselves a nuisance 
to somewhat unsympathizing consuls. Altogether 
there are not many of the class who have the spirit 
of adventure to wander so far, and the West Indies 
are not likely to become an American tramps' 
paradise in spite of their advantages for laziness. 

The French part of the island of San Martin is 
called Marigot. There are two ways thither from 
Great Bay, one by land and one by water. The route 
by land is over hills and down valleys, and the road 
is generally in such a condition as to be nearly im- 



124 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. . 

passable to carriages from unmended washouts. A 
ride on horseback in a broiling sun presented few 
attractions, in spite of the charms of the mountain 
scenery, and the choice was given to a row-boat. 
Two of the splendid boatmen of the islands, brawny, 
supple and untiring, took the oars, and the traveller 
ensconced himself in the stern under an umbrella. 
The way led past the projecting point, which pro- 
tects the harbor on the west, and which has at its 
extremity the maritime signal station. Above it 
rose a lofty hill, crowned with the crumbling grey 
stone walls of an ancient fortress, dating back to the 
days when every one of these islands was a coveted 
prey to the warring European nations, and a hostile 
fleet might be expected any day in the harbor with 
designs of plunder or conquest. Now their sole 
garrisons are the lizards, and the fierce tropical 
vegetation is disjointing and uprooting the strong 
and solid masonry of the bastions and walls. 

It was a new sensation to be pulled along the edge 
of the rolling surf that was boiling up the red rocks 
in white foam, and to feel the power of the sea wrestle 
with the strong arms of the boatmen. But their 
muscles were of steel, and their power was as sure 
as the machinery of a steamboat. Point after point 
we passed with the angry teeth of sunken rocks 
jutting up into the sea and spluttering with foam, 
until finally we reached the mouth of a lagoon that 



SAN MARTIN. 125 

opened suddenly in the shore. Here was a new 
feature in tropical journeying-. The water was ab- 
solutely calm and waveless between the sheltering 
shores. 

The hue had changed to a beautiful emerald green, 
and, at times, was almost white in the shallows, so clear 
and pellucid was it. Everything could be seen on the 
bottom at the depth of several feet, strange forms 
of marine plants, with colors as brilliant as those of 
orchids, queerly shaped fish darting away in alarm 
at the splash of the oars, and medusoe and mollusks 
of all forms and colors. It was a natural aquarium 
of infinite variety and beauty. Once we came upon 
a huge turtle, several feet in diameter, slowly crawling 
to some undisturbed retreat, and which the boatmen 
regarded with eager and covetous eyes. Now the 
lagoon narrowed to a strait and now broadened to a 
wide lake. From behind a wooded islet would appear 
a rude native boat, filled with a chattering crew of 
men and women, who would pause and stare curiously 
at the stranger, and here and there a solitary fisher- 
man would be seen pulling up his wicker traps. On 
the shore were ruins of ancient houses amid aban- 
doned plantations, and one or two white wooden 
residences, embowered in greenery, whose owners 
were stock -farmers, the sugar industry being entirely 
abandoned. Negro huts, thatched with palm, nestled 

among the trees, and the smoke of their cooking fires 

11* 



126 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

rose straight in the tranquil air. The sharp rays of 
the sun pierced the umbrella like a sieve, and sparkled 
on the water with blinding intensity. 

At length, after a couple of hours of untiring row, 
the lagoon narrowed to a pocket. Rows of huts 
appeared along the shore, and beyond them the 
roofs of more substantial houses. We had taken 
Marigot in the rear. The town is hardly more than 
a single wide street, with warehouses that showed 
signs of former prosperity, and ending or beginning 
at a single wharf. The harbor is a beautiful one, 
encircled on one side by a long thin line of project- 
ing beach, with a row of feathery palms silhouetted 
against the sky and its white sand sparkling in the 
sun. The atmosphere of the place was decidedly 
French, the French of the shores of the Mediterra- 
nean, and, except for the color of the people, might 
have been taken for a fishing village on the Mar- 
seilles coast. The population was noisy and ani- 
mated to an extraordinary degree, gesticulating and 
jabbering in a Creole patois, and the women wore 
gayer turbans and more variegated garments than the 
soberer inhabitants of the Dutch division of the island. 
An attempt to take a photograph of a picturesque 
group of market women on the wharf produced a 
collision with the authorities. A gendarme rushed 
up with the information that such an operation was 
" defendu," and it was only after a visit to the mayor 



SAN MARTIN. 127 

that license was given to perpetuate the features of 
the negro women on a gelatine plate. It is to be 
supposed that prohibition to take plans of the French 
fortifications on the German frontier has been ex- 
tended to a general ordinance for the colonies, but 
the only fortress in Marigot is a stone ruin on the 
hill commanding the town, whose rusty cannons are 
sunk in the ground, and whose crumbling barracks 
are inhabited by a negro family, whose washing was 
drying on the ramparts. No nation would probably 
take Marigot as a gift, but the gendarme was doubt- 
less proud of having performed his full duty in pre- 
serving the mystery of its defences. 

In the harbor was a small schooner taking a party 
of laborers to San Domingo, where some recent ex- 
ploitations by American capitalists have given the 
promise of work to these unoccupied people. Her 
deck was swarming with men, whose only baggage 
apparently was the clothes they stood in, and whose 
natural gaiety was stimulated by numerous farewell 
glasses of rum. They were shouting and whooping 
and dancing on the narrow deck of the vessel, and 
around it were the boats containing the wives and 
sweethearts, who were apparently equally happy at 
the departure of the men and the prospect of their 
return with a portion of their wages. The whole 
scene had more the air of a picnic or a pleasure ex- 
cursion than an emigration, although many of the 



128 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

men will probably leave their bones in the forests of 
San Domingo, and the date of the return of any of 
them was very problematical. But the negro has 
very little idea of the perils of the future, and the 
French negro seems to be even more light-hearted 
and careless than those of the English islands. At 
any rate the women are likely to be quite as well off 
without their alleged supporters as with them, for they 
do the most of the work, and their affections are not 
very deeply engaged in their more or less temporary 
union. Finally the schooner slowly hoisted her sails 
and bore out of the harbor with the freshening 
breeze, the noise of the shouting passengers being 
lost in the distance, and the boats returned to the 
shore without, so far as could be seen, a single dis- 
consolate countenance among the deserted women. 
The attractions and curiosities of Marigot were 
not many. The drinking-shops had somewhat the 
air of shabby French cabarets in the noisiness of 
their customers, and there was a distinct local color 
about the place, which showed a change in the 
nationality from the Dutch quarter. But otherwise 
it was a West Indian town, with all the familiar 
features and no new ones. An enthusiastic French- 
man stopped the visitor to express his admiration for 
the United States and his warm desire that it should 
take possession of the West India islands, but his 
enthusiasm was apparently in some measure due to 



SAN MARTIN. 129 

absinthe. At least no permanent arrangements were 
made between the two for the transfer, and Marigot 
is likely to remain for some time in possession of the 
French Republic unless she turns it over to the 
people themselves. On our way home it had become 
dusk when we reached the open sea. The current 
was strong and the wind ahead. An occasional wave 
spurted its spray into the face, and the gusty night 
uttered warning voices. A dark cloud gathered over 
the mountain, and suddenly a rain squall swept down 
upon the sea. Crouching behind the umbrella was 
not much protection against the driving drops, and 
an inch or so of water invaded the feet. It was with 
a decided sense of relief that the wharf was gained, 
and the drenched boatmen shifted their oars out of 
their rowlocks. They seemed to mind the shower no 
more than water-rats, and merely shook themselves 
like dogs to scatter the water from their drenched 
garments. The effeminate traveller hastened to get 
into dry garments and take a preventive against the 
fever. 



VIII. 

ST. BABTS. 

ABANDONED PINEAPPLE PLANTATIONS — DEEAM OF TEAN- 
QUIL BEAUTY IN AN AMPHITHEATRE OF HILLS — A 
WEDDING — TYPE OF A BUCCANEEE — THE STOEY OF A 
CEIME— A WEST INDIAN EVENING. 

Basse Terbe, St. Kjtts, Feb. 10, 1896. 

I was fortunate enough to find a conveyance from 
San Martin to the French island of St. BartholemeAv, 
otherwise known as St. Barts, in a more comfortable 
vessel than the ordinary country sloops. The cap- 
tain of the schooner, the Maid of the Mist, sixty 
tons burden, which conveys salt from San Martin to 
the neighboring islands, and sometimes runs up as 
far as Florida, agreed to go a little out of his course 
and land me at St. Barts. The schooner is a staunch 
one, very strongly built, as she needs be to stand the 
tempestuous weather of the hurricane season, and 
stood up stiffly in the strong breeze. I think the 
captain was a little disappointed in his bargain, for 
it was a dead beat to windward all the way. St. 
Barts is in plain sight of San Martin, looming hilly 



ST. BARTS. 131 

and dark, with outlying sentinels of lofty rocks 
standing- out in the sea, while still farther to the 
north lay the low, flat island of Anguilla. The 
schooner made long stretches out to sea, and then it 
was " 'bout ship " and " hard-a-lee," and she would 
spin around like a top, with fluttering sails, for 
another stretch in the opposite course. Slowly, very 
slowly, we made our way toward the island, whose 
features gradually grew more distinct. Night fell, lit 
by a glorious moon, and we were still outside the outer 
sentinels of rocks. It was not until nearly 10 o'clock 
that the schooner made her last short tack in the 
narrow harbor and the anchor tore out the rattling 
chain. There was a wandering light on the shore, 
and voices hailed us. There was much shouting in 
a vain attempt to get the harbor-master to come off 
and permit the solitary passenger to land, and at one 
time it looked as though the schooner wOuld have to 
remain until morning before the ban could be re- 
moved. Finally, however, the captain lowered his 
boat and went off to a French man-of-war lying in 
the harbor, where he found a medical officer to ap- 
prove his bill of health, and I was put on shore. 
Instead of the usual crowd of porters there was but 
a solitary girl waiting to receive me. She threw the 
strap of my bag around her neck, grasped my camera 
case and led the way over the uneven flags with 
which the town is paved to the solitary lodging- 



132 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

house of the island, to which, after some delay and. 
fluttering- of lights, I was admitted and made welcome 
with cordial friendliness. 

St. Barts lies on both sides of a long and narrow 
bay or lagoon called the " Gros Goulot," which forms 
a safe retreat for the sloops during the hurricane 
season, and where they lie with their anchors down 
and their masts taken out until it is safe to resume 
their trade again. The principal street lies under 
the lee of a lofty and steep ridge, covered with vege-. 
tation and along whose top are to be seen the stone 
ruins of ancient residences. There are some good 
houses still remaining, although unpainted and dingy, 
and large warehouses, showing the ancient trade. 
But the iron shutters have been long put up and 
grown rusty, and the only business now done is in 
a few small shops clustered about the landing*- 
place. Time was when St. Barts was a famous place 
for pineapples, and as many as 20 and 30 American 
schooners have been seen in the harbor at a time 
loading with the fruit. But that has long gone by ; 
the pineapple plantations have been abandoned, and 
there is no trade from the island except a few goats 
and sheep, turtles, palm hats and such driblets 
of produce as are exported to the neighboring 
islands. It is a wonder how the people live. Every- 
thing is very cheap, to be sure, but it requires a 
little money to buy even the cheapest of necessaries, 



ST. BARTS. 133 

and it is impossible to see where it comes from. 
There is no market place, and the men and women go 
wandering abont with baskets of fish and vegetables, 
and pass from kitchen to kitchen without apparently 
diminishing their stock. There are many beggars 
in St. Baits, not the impudent urchins and brazen 
women of the other islands, who salute every well- 
dressed stranger with the demand "Me beg you a 
penny," but cases of real want and hunger, where 
the few sous are wanting to buy a fish or a yam. 
Poor women will seat themselves at your door in 
silence and with only a despairing gesture of the 
hand demand the alms which the hardest heart 
cannot refuse, or some forlorn old creature will 
hobble into your room and pitifully tell you that she 
will not have a mouthful that day unless you give 
her the means to get it. Tiny little children are 
taught to ask for alms. One beautiful little creature 
with only a shirt to cover his chubby form came 
painfully toiling up the steps on his tottering little 
legs. He could not speak, but he held out his hand 
for a sou, and pulled off his little cap in thanks when 
he got it. The spectacle of the poverty of the 
respectable classes was hardly less painful — the worn 
and faded furniture of their houses, their poor but 
decent garments, and the appearance of life upon 
the threadbare edge of existence. There was ap- 
parently more poverty in St. Barts than in any of 

12 



134: UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

the islands I have visited, and a deeper and more 
hopeless decay from ancient prosperity. Not that 
the aspect of the place is gloomy by any means. 
The sun is bright ; the sea is bine ; the trees and vege- 
tation are fresh and green ; the negroes are gay with 
the unfailing cheerfulness of the tropics, and ragged- 
ness and poverty have not the distressful air of colder 
and less hospitable climes. For most, indeed, there 
is f.ood in plenty, and the other necessities of life 
elsewhere are here superfluities. Children swarm 
everywhere, and there is not the slightest evidence 
that there will be any diminution in the population 
because there is nothing to do. 

There is a beautiful walk in St. Barts climbing the 
high hill, which has the fort on its summit. There on 
a narrow plateau are the ancient buildings still main- 
tained in repair and inhabited, not by soldiers, but 
by an ancient functionary and his numerous family. 
The esplanade is swept clean, and the ancient cannons 
are still in their places, while the flag-staff shows 
that the place is still a fortress of France, if it could 
hardly be defended against an invasion of goats. 
As a matter of fact, the garrison of St. Barts consists 
of three gendarmes, the army of five having been 
reduced by various casualties to that number. From 
the fort there is a most beautiful view, the long 
harbor lying at your feet, and across the opposite 
shore with its houses and ruins basking in the sun- 



ST. BARTS. 135 

shine. Beyond them lies the sweeping- circle of the 
blue sea and the wide horizon of the fleecy sky. 
From the fort out into the country the road winds 
under a lofty hill, which affords a grateful shade 
against the climbing sun. Men are met coming in 
with burdens who give a smiling " bon jour," and 
neatly clad little children are making their way to 
the school in the town. Suddenly winding round a 
turn in the road you come upon a scene which is 
absolutely one of the most charming in its tranquil 
beauty in all the West Indies. It is an amphitheatre 
of lovely hills surrounding a tract of level land, most 
beautifully green, soft and enchanting. There are 
two houses of ancient plantations to give a human 
aspect to the scene, and in the centre rises a tall and 
beautiful palm to accentuate the tropic aspect. Be- 
yond are the blue waters of an inlet of the sea sleep- 
ing under the shadow of the farther hill. The picture 
makes a dream of tranquil beauty. Reluctantly turn- 
ing we follow the road, which winds under the fort. 
It skirts the waters of a still lagoon, and is bordered 
by rows of the deadly manchineel tree, whose gray 
stems and luxuriant foliage give no token of the 
maleficence which is sometimes betrayed by nature 
as well as by animal and man. Upon the border of 
the open sea the surf is rolling lazily in, and 

" Beauty bom of murmuring sound " 
envelops the scene. 



136 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Among- the incidents at St. Barts was the wedding 
of a country couple. The civil ceremony previous 
to that in the church took place at the Mairie, a large 
building, much too extensive for the restricted func- 
tions of the government. At 9 o'clock the bridal 
procession was seen advancing up the street. There 
are no carriages in St. Barts, and the marriage party 
had perforce to walk. No one knows how many 
miles they had been compelled to traverse, but their 
costumes were neat and clean and their faces fresh. 
The procession was headed by the bride and groom 
under black umbrellas, she in white with a white veil 
and orange blossoms, and he in correct black, and 
the cortege of a dozen or more were dressed in a 
manner to do credit to the taste of the country 
people. The ceremony took place in a lofty room 
adorned with the image of the French Republic in 
the shape of a tiaral female figure in white plaster. 
The mayor, adorned with his scarf, sat at the head of 
the table around which the bridal party were seated, 
while his secretary read the long formularies of the 
French law, including the attested consent of the 
parents of the contracting parties, and then pro- 
nounced them duly married. There was no kissing 
or embracing or effusion of feeling of any kind, and 
the ceremony was as coldly formal and constrained as 
possible. Some young women of the town and some 
nurses with children had gathered to witness the 



ST. BARTS. 137 

spectacle, but otherwise it might have been the 
signature of a last will and testament instead of a 
wedding. From the Mairie the party took their way 
to. the Roman Catholic church at the other end of 
the town, where the religious ceremony was per- 
formed, and from thence to their homes, where the 
wedding festivities doubtless broke up the solemn 
constraint of the official ceremonies. The country 
population of St. Barts is almost exclusively of 
French descent and Roman Catholic, although the 
island was for a number of years in the possession 
of Sweden. 

The island, it seems, was the private property 
of Marshal Bernadotte, and when he became king 
of Sweden it passed to the ownership of the crown. 
About seventeen years ago it was retroceded to 
France by vote of the people, largely under the 
influence of the Roman Catholic priesthood. The 
more intelligent people of the town appear to regret 
the change, and to regard the rule of Sweden as more 
kindly and generous than that of France. The island 
is now simply a commune of Guadaloupe, with no 
resident governor and no independent representation 
in the Chamber of Deputies. A Swedish man-of- 
war had been recently in the harbor, and her visit 
was the occasion of many rejoicings, including a 
grand ball, in which, doubtless, much ancient finery 
was furbished up to adorn the younger generation. 

12* 



138 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

The French man-of-war, on the contrary, was quite 
coldly received, and the only festivities it occasioned 
were the carousing 1 of its drunken sailors on shore. 
Once in a while in the West Indies, as in other 
parts of the world, one comes across survivals of 
ancient types, which recall epochs and methods of 
life which have long- since passed away, and which 
show how persistent is a strong strain of blood. 
The buccaneers and pirates have long since vanished 
from the Spanish Main, and the majority of the 
inhabitants of the islands are as peaceful and com- 
monplace in their appearance as in their avocations. 
But in St. Barts there was a man, a stranger, 
who had wandered there by some chance, who 
presented the perfect image of the pirate chief, who 
commanded the long, black schooner which swept 
suddenly out of some lagoon to pounce on the 
unsuspecting merchantman. He was tall and dark, 
with a handsome countenance and a full black beard. 
But there was that in his keen eye, and the free and 
daring grace of his movements, and the expression 
of his countenance, not so much cruel as pitiless, if 
the fine distinction may be drawn, which suggested 
at once that he would be at home on the deck of a 
vessel whose crew were governed with the pistol 
shot, and whose regard for a trading craft would be 
that of a tiger for its prey. He may have been the 
most peaceful and harmless man in the world, and 



ST. BARTS. 139 

engaged in no more unlawful occupation than in 
trading for yams and buying goats, but if lie is not 
a descendant in right line and full instinct from some 
pirate chief, then there is no faith in the laws of 
physiognomy and the perpetuation of characteristics. 
St. Barts, like the neighboring islands of Saba and 
St. Eustatius, was the haunt of pirates in their day, 
and one of their latest representatives, Captain Tom 
Howley, w r as hung on the Point as late as the begin- 
ning of the present century. 

It was my privilege to spend the last evening of 
my visit at St. Johns, the beautiful valley that had so 
charmed me with the spectacle by day. Seated on 
the broad stone verandah of one of the houses, 
representing one of the two estates into which the 
valley is divided, one looked over the broad, level 
field lit by the light of the full moon, and clothed 
in a faint white mist. Cattle were feeding here 
and there or lay recumbent on the sward. The 
waters of the lagoon sparkled in the distance, 
and the palm tree softly waved its feathery head. 
The various insect voices of the tropic night filled 
the air, and the scene and atmosphere were of ex- 
quisite beauty and romance. The hours were spent 
in the w r arm and cordial friendliness of West Indian 
hospitality, wdiich welcomes the rare stranger with 
a fresh stock of news and ideas, as if, to borrow 
the expression of the chief justice of the Leeward 



140 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Islands, " lie was the angel Gabriel come to gossip," 
and makes one feel that one is conferring a favor as 
well as receiving one. That night was marked with 
a white stone in my West Indian wanderings. 



IX. 
KIOTING IN ST. KITTS. 

SUGAR BUILDINGS DESTROYED BY FIRES SET BY NEGRO 
MOBS — CANE FIELDS DESTROYED ALL OYER THE 
ISLAND — MAGISTRATES IMBECILE AND THE POLICE 
FORCE PRACTICALLY HELPLESS. 

Basse Terre, St. Kjtts, February 18, 1896. 

St. Kitts lias had its little excitement, which, 
though comparatively trifling- in its results thus far, 
shows what volcanic forces lie under these fair and 
beautiful islands, of a different nature from those 
which first thrust them up from the bottom of the 
sea. It came in the shape of labor disturbances on 
the plantations, followed by a riot in the town of 
Basse Terre. For more than a week the sky has 
been illuminated by the light of burning cane fields, 
set on fire by the negroes in revenge for their failure 
to obtain an increase of wages. The incendiarism 
began on the plantations of a Portuguese proprietor, 
who is not popular on account of his miserly dis- 
position, and was regarded as simply an act of 
isolated revenge. But the contagion spread so that 
in all parts of the island cane fields just ready for 
the harvest were ruined. Still the government au- 
thorities acted very supinely, merely offering a trifling 



142 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

reward for the apprehension of the incendiaries, in- 
stead of arresting 1 a dozen or twenty of the noisiest 
of the ringleaders and putting them in jail, which 
would probably have quelled the disturbance. For 
some nights the fires were not aocompanied by any 
disturbances, but becoming emboldened by impunity 
and excited by communion in idleness, the negroes 
broke out into violence on Sunday night at a planta- 
tion called Stone Fort, some six or eight miles from 
town on the leeward side of the island. Various 
startling stories were brought into town in the early 
morning about men being killed and the plantation 
house in a state of siege. I took a carriage and 
drove out. It was a lovely morning, and all nature 
smiled as if there were no such thing as the angry 
passions of men to vex her calm. The surf rolled in 
with its long, low roar, and the mountain and fields 
were sparkling in the warm sunshine. We met the 
usual wayfarers on the road, men and women walk- 
ing into town with burdens on their heads, carts 
loaded with cane for the boiling-houses, and a 
stray horseman or two. Washerwomen were stand- 
ing middle deep in the stream pounding unfortunate 
garments on the rocks, and the children about the 
cabin doors were as noisy and frolicsome as usual. 
It was not until we arrived at the village of Old 
Koad that there were signs of any unusual event in 
the air. The street was filled with a noisy and ges- 



RIOTING IN ST. KITTS. 143 

ticulating mob, which crowded in and out of the rum 
shops, and was evidently in a very considerable state 
of excitement. They yelled and jeered at me as my 
carriage passed through them, not with any apparent 
ferocity or ill-will, but in simple bravado and in- 
solence. The only sign of violence was when a burly 
and brutal negro made a heavy blow upon the side 
of the carriage with a club, but it was not intended 
to do me any harm. At length, after various wander- 
ings and blunderings in which I paid unexpected 
visits to several disturbed proprietors, we found the 
place. The yard around the boiling-house, which 
was paved with megass, or the refuse of the cane, 
was crowded with a thick throng of negroes, men, 
women and children, some two or three hundred in 
number. They were not savage, although excited 
in demeanor, and made way readily enough for the 
carriage. Among them were a dozen or so of the 
black policemen from town, who were exercising no 
sort of restraint upon the noise and gesticulation, 
and were apparently friendly spectators rather than 
otherwise. The plantation house was on the summit 
of a steep hill, and was reached by a long flight of 
stone steps after the climb. It overlooked the broad 
fields of the plantation, which the day before had 
been waving with ripe cane ready for the harvest, 
but were now withered and blackened with the de- 
vastating fires of the night. The manager, a gallant 



144 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

young fellow, crawled painfully into the room in his 
pajamas to meet me. He had been severely bruised 
in the leg' with a stone while standing 1 guard at the 
boiler-house, and been compelled to tire his revolver 
at his assailants, of whom he had wounded two. He 
described it as rather a "nasty night." The mad- 
dened mob, after setting fire to the cane, had paraded 
up and down the road below the house with waving 
torches and drums beating and with wild yells and 
songs. Some spark of barbaric ferocity in a brain 
inflamed with rum might easily have led the men to 
sack and burn the house, and the occupants might 
have considered themselves fortunate if they had 
escaped with their lives. Nevertheless the brave 
wife was as cheerful and hospitable as if she had 
not passed through a night of terror, and the little 
children played about quite unconscious of the 
anxious eyes which had watched their sleep. The 
family seemed to be a little reassured by the presence 
of the police, although to me they seemed but a 
feeble dependence, and hoped that the worst was 
passed. But after my return to town violence broke 
out again. The overseer had his arm broken by a 
stone and was driven into his house, from whence 
they refused to allow him to be carried or for a 
doctor to approach him. To close the episode of 
Stone Fort, a detachment of sailors from a British 
man-of-war in the harbor, was sent on the little 



RIOTING IN ST. KITTS. 145 

steamer Greenwood, to Old Road, where they landed, 
and stood guard over the plantation until morning - . 
The mob with a wholesome respect refrained from 
anything but noise, and therefore lived to make a 
noise another night. 

Meanwhile, what of the town. The first sign of 
excitement was the appearance of a gang of field 
laborers, men and women, parading the streets with 
drums and tambourines, and followed by the usual 
crowd of dancing and jumping urchins. But as the 
afternoon wore on affairs began to assume a more 
serious aspect. The boatmen of the harbors had 
gone out on strike. They had hauled their boats up 
on the beach, and declared that they would not and 
that no one else could land passengers from the 
steamers until the rate of fare had been officially 
doubled. By the most culpable negligence on the 
part of the authorities the rum shops had been 
allowed to remain open, and the mob grew more 
savage and noisy every hour. The sound of the 
conch shells blown with barbarous dissonance grew 
louder and more frequent, and almost the entire 
negro population was under the influence of strong 
excitement. The long jetty was crowded from end 
to end with a yelling crowd, and when some passen- 
gers from the steamer Tyne were landed in the 
steamer's boat they were jostled and insulted, and 
a negro or two had to be knocked down before they 

13 



146 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

would give way. There was every sign of an ap- 
proaching riot to come with the night, but still the 
supreme authorities neglected to call for a force of 
marines from a man-of-war in the harbor, and allowed 
things to take their course. When night darkened 
down the street lamps were lit and there the rioters 
assembled. They were not in large parties and had 
apparently no common purpose or plan. Their first 
act; as was natural, was to smash the street lamps, 
and soon there was a sound of splintering glass all 
over the town, and the gutters were running with fire 
from the burning oil. When an attempt was made 
to put these out with water and earth the stones 
began to fly and then the house had to transform 
itself into a state of siege. The wooden shutters 
were closed to, the windows and the door to the 
court-yard barred. The solitary man in the house 
stood guard with his revolver at the gate without 
feeling that he was doing anything particularly 
valiant, while the boys enjoyed the excitement and 
the women flitted about in a state of more or less 
anxiety and alarm. There would be an interval of 
silence, and then along would come a roaring mob, 
with drums beating, and the heavy stones would 
strike in a shower upon the windows and door, and 
then pass on. There was no knowing, of course, 
when they might resort to actual assault, with plun- 
der, or still worse, to fire. Meanwhile the bright 



RIOTING IN ST. KITTS. 147 

flashlight of the man-of-war began to wander over 
the town and shoot bright bars up into the sky. It 
was evident relief was coming. In fact, after the 
mob had had practical possession of the town for 
more than an hour a party of twenty-six marines 
were landed. But the mob, which had already 
looted two or three rum shops, had become savage 
and foolhardy, and were not at once to be intimidated 
by so small a party. Fortunately, they did not 
gather together in one mass, or they might have 
overwhelmed them, but they charged then several 
times in small parties, and were received with the 
butt ends of the rifles on their hard heads, which 
drove them back and scattered them. It was an 
illustration of the refrain of Rudyard Kipling's song : 

" Oh, my, don't- you come anigh, 
When Tommy is a workin' with the bayonet and the butt." 

Meanwhile the marines were swearing mad at not 
being allowed to fire at the blankety blank beggars 
who were pelting them with stones from around the 
corners and running away in the darkness. The riot 
act had not been read in due form, and the timid or 
imbecile magistrate refused to do so. The marines 
swore they were risking their lives for the people of 
St. Kitts, who refused to allow them to defend them- 
selves, but nevertheless they marched steadily about 
the streets, dispersing every group as it gathered, 



148 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

and taking their peltings with profane philosophy. 
Finally, at about 11 o'clock, the dreaded cry of 
tire was raised, and the cracked old town bell began 
to tinkle its alarm. "Wails and shrieks and fiercer 
cries were heard, and it seemed as though the crisis 
had actually arrived. But, fortunately, the fire was 
not in a densely settled part of the town, and 
was in only a flimsy building. The fire was soon 
extinguished by the rigorous exertions of the fire- 
brigade, aided by volunteers. The negroes attempted 
to interfere, and once cut the hose, but it was re- 
placed, and a few streams from the nozzles full in 
their faces dampened their ardor. There were two 
or three narrow escapes fi'om serious fires during the 
night. On one occasion the mob, in plundering a 
rum shop, had dropped the lamp on the floor, but, 
fortunately, it did not break, and was pitched out 
into the street by School Superintendent "Watkins, 
who distinguished himself by his coolness and bravery 
during the night. There were other instances of 
pluck and presence of mind among the people, *but, 
as a whole, the riot found them unprepared and 
without concert of action, and it is not too much to 
say that but for the presence of the small body of 
disciplined marines from the man-of-war, the town 
of Basse Terre would have been sacked and burned. 
The magistrates were imbecile, and the police force 
practically helpless, even if its fidelity could have 



RIOTING IN ST. KITTS. 149 

been depended upon, which was by no means certain, 
as they were all black and recruited from the people 
among whom they rived. As the night wore on, shots 
began to be heard, first a volley as a warning that 
the guns were not altogether to be used as clubs, 
and then more serious business, which killed and 
wounded a number of the negroes. Marauders 
were caught attempting to break into houses and 
summarily shot, without benefit of the riot act, and 
others were lugged off to the jail, which was soon 
overflowing. But, as a whole, after midnight the 
noisy mob had dispersed and its members had 
crawled into their cabins to nurse their broken 
heads and sleep off the effects of their orgies on 
stolen liquors, to appear in the morning with as 
innocent faces as they could assume, but keeping an 
eye out all the time for the apprehended approach 
of a policeman. 

Meanwhile the people of St. Kitts have got some- 
thing more serious to talk about than their ordinary 
parochial gossip of Little Peddington. The boats 
are still drawn up on the beach and the sullen boat- 
men refuse to pull an oar. An American steamer 
which arrived last night had to lower her own boats 
in order to take the mails and passengers on shore. 
There were no more plantation fires last night, but 
there is no knowing how soon they may begin again, 
and prevention is practically impossible. It is not 

13* 



150 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

likely that the mob will break out again so long- as 
the marines are here, but the man-of-war cannot 
remain a permanent station in the harbor, and when 
she is gone the mob has learned its strength and 
opportunity. As a matter of fact, the island makes 
too paltry a return to Great Britan for her to main- 
tain a garrison here, and the white people can only 
depend on themselves for defence. This means the 
raising of a volunteer force, which would doubtless 
be effectual for a time, but the worst of it is that all 
these disturbances and the evidence of the unreliable 
character of the people will tend to hasten the decay 
of the island, cripple its industry and lead to the 
gradual depopulation of the whites. Then the negro 
will have things his own way, accentuating his acces- 
sion to power with arson and murder or not, as it 
may happen. These are the spectres which rise 
before the people of St. Kitts to-day as they discuss 
the events of last night with more or less wisdom, 
and with the usual stern decision which avenges any 
little unreadiness when the events were actually 
transpiring. We may wish them a safe deliverance 
from their troubles without having too much con- 
fidence in their wisdom in the drift of circumstances. 
At all events, something has really happened in St. 
Kitts since the great cloudburst on Mount Misery 
which swept away half the town some twenty years 
ago. 



X. 

MONTSEKKAT. 

THE TOWN OF PLYMOUTH AND ITS ABANDONED PLANTA- 
TIONS — A RIDE TO "WINDWARD — EVENING SCENES ON 
THE ISLAND — THE ROCK OF REDONDA AND ITS 
TRAGEDY — IN THE GOLDEN TWILIGHT. 

Basse Terre, St. Kitts, March 4, 1896. 

There is a little steamer called the Tyne, which 
performs the mail and passenger service between the 
Leeward Islands under a subsidy from the govern- 
ment. Even with that the steamer does not pay, so 
slight is the amount of travel and traffic, and there 
is talk of taking her off at the expiration of her con- 
tract, when the service will be reduced to sailing 
vessels, and perhaps in due course of time to pirogues, 
if the islands continue to pursue the progress of 
decay. At any rate, howe-yer, the Tyne affords a 
more comfortable way of getting about than by the 
country sloops and schooners, which may be a couple 
of days banging about the distance of thirty or forty 
miles that separate the islands, to say nothing of the 
fact that during the hurricane months they are laid 



152 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

up in some inlet with four anchors down and their 
spars taken out. The Tyne is a stout, dumpy little 
boat, with a terrible propensity to roll, and on the 
long swells she dips and balances with never-ending 
oscillation. Nevertheless, she ploughs a strong and 
rapid way, and after an hour or two's rest in the 
picturesque harbor of Antigua, nightfall finds her 
skirting the shores of Montserrat. The hills darkly 
outlined against the moonlit sky are notched like the 
teeth of a saw, and stretch along for miles and miles 
in sharp and jagged peaks. Here and there a light 
twinkles from the bosky gloom, showing that the 
inhabitants of some negro cabin are yet awake, but 
the shores are too far off for the voices of the night 
to reach us. At length we come to a group of build- 
ings nestling by the water side, and the red flare of a 
lantern at the end of a wharf. Boats surround the 
steamer in a flock, and after the usual noise and gab- 
bling of the boatmen we were landed in the town of 
Plymouth, where a policeman takes our names as if 
we were suspects. There is a walk over the uneven 
flags of the narrow streets, across a bridge, which 
spans a dry river bed, and around a winding road 
flanked by rustling cane fields, and we are at a 
hospitable cottage on Cocoanut Hill, where the calm 
voices of the palni leaves stirring in the gentle breeze 
and the monotonous chirping of the tree frogs send 
us to a tranquil sleep. 



MONTSERRAT. 153 

Although all these West India islands have many 
features in common in their general configuration as 
well as in their vegetation and atmosphere, there is 
yet something distinct about each one of them, which 
gives it a peculiar flavor of its own. And this not 
only when the islands are inhabited by different 
nationalities, but by the same people with the same 
habits and occupations in life. Some accident in the 
foundation of a colony perpetuating the character- 
istics of some locality or province in the mother 
countiy may survive in the architecture or the ways 
of the people, although the tradition of the origin 
may have entirely disappeared. It is so in the town 
of Plymouth. Instead of the broad and wide road- 
ways, and free beaches of many West Indian towns, 
the streets are narrow and tortuous, and the houses 
are huddled together upon the shore like some 
ancient English or Irish sea-port town. There are 
narrow courts and no thoroughfares, massive build- 
ings of decayed solidity that block the way, and 
strange surprises in the way of back shops and 
saloons like an ancient European town in miniature. 
In fact, in spite of the vegetation, the hot sun and 
the color of the people, there are times when for a 
fleeting instant the visitor has an idea that he is 
in some secluded part of the town of Galway, so 
strongly do the shapes of the buildings recall the 
aspect of that place. There is a stone building, 



154 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

dingily whitewashed, in a nook under the hill, which 
bears the title of the Royal Victoria Hotel, and on 
its wall is the inscription in black letters : " This is 
the house that Jack built," which might be taken to 
signify either the pride of the founder of the establish- 
ment or the fact that it was erected by the contribu- 
tions of the sailors ashore, who patronized its bar. 
It is the very type of a sea-port inn, where sailors 
might carouse away their dollars, and in the old days 
has doubtless heard many a hoarse chant of 

'■ From Ushant to Scilly it's thirty-five leagues," 

or other deep-sea songs, the banging of the counter 
with horny fists for more rum, and perhaps witnessed 
many desperate rows when English Jack found himself 
in contact with the members of a French or Spanish 
crew. It is quiet enough now ; its court-yard is 
filled with rubbish ; its gallery is empty, and its 
custom is of the feeblest. There are now no 
merchant vessels which come to the roadstead of 
Plymouth for cargoes of sugar and coffee. What 
little merchandise Montserrat produces is now taken 
away in steamers for New York, London or Glasgow, 
who call there occasionally and take on a few 
puncheons or boxes and sail away again. Montser- 
rat is more prosperous than some of the smaller 
West Indian islands, having a greater variety of 
culture, which includes coffee and cacao as well as 



MONTSERRAT. 155 

sugar, and is especially renowned for its product of 
lime juice, of which there is a large factory. But 
like all of them, it is decayed from its ancient 
wealth. The white population has diminished from 
1,500 to about 150, and there are abandoned planta- 
tions anpl closed warehouses there as elsewhere. 
Most of the cultivation is done by negroes upon 
shares, so that they are more thrifty and industrious, 
as well as less turbulent, than in the islands Avhere 
they are employed by the planters at wages, and 
there have been no riots and burnings of cane fields 
as recently in St. Kitts and Nevis. Montserrat may 
live a little longer than the rest of the Lesser 
Antilles, but like them it is slowly but surely passing 
into the hands of the descendants of the Mandingoes 
and Congos, who were brought from Africa in the 
slave ships, and who are avenged by seeing the ruin 
and decay of the descendants of their oppressors. 
There was an old steward of American ships, fat, 
grey, and voluble, who used to seat himself on 
the stringer of the wharf at evening and was very glad 
to disburden himself of his gossip to a fresh listener. 
He had returned to Montserrat after many years 
deep-sea voyaging in American clippers and whale 
ships, and established a bake-shop as a support for 
his declining years. He was, however, restless in 
his stagnation, and declared his purpose to go to 
the States next year in search of another berth 



156 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

aboard ship. In the interval of the recital of his 
adventures he told many things of the ancient 
glories of Montserrat, the splendors and prodigality 
of its planters and the high-flying prosperity of the 
golden age, whose vanishing skirts he had witnessed. 
It appears that many of the planters of Montserrat 
were Irish of good Galway families, who perpetuated 
the habits and traditions of their race in their way 
of living, and wasted their substance even more 
prodigally than their compeers in the neighboring 
islands. They have now entirely disappeared and 
their solitary descendant, who has a lick of the tar- 
brush in his complexion, as they say, is now living 
in poverty in England, without money enough to pay 
his passage home, while his great estates are in 
litigation and managed by the attorney in the usual 
skimping and hand-to-mouth fashion. 

There are some beautiful drives in Montserrat, to 
the northward in sight of the flashing blue plain of 
the sea and to windward quite through the heart of 
the island to the opposite coast. The road through 
the island climbs a succession of steep hills winding 
around declivities and along the edges of deep 
ravines in whose beds, hidden by the Irish vegeta- 
tion, foaming torrents pour in the rainy season. To 
the right and left on the sides of the hills and in the 
flat lands between are the plantations of sugar-cane, 
the dark green groves of the dwarfish lime trees, 



MONTSERRAT. 157 

and the plants of the coffee and cacao. Here and 
there arise the tall chimney of the sugar boiling- 
house or the lime juice factory. Men and women 
are tramping into town with burdens of fruit or 
vegetables on their heads, and maybe with a fowl or 
two under the arm. Almost all are chewing great 
pieces of sugar-cane with their strong white teeth 
and smile a pleasant good morning as they pass. A 
boy comes along riding well back on the quarter 
deck of his diminutive donkey, as a sailor would say, 
and now and then we come upon a heavy wagon 
drawn by oxen and piled high with sugar-cane. As 
we are slowly climbing a hill, there is a quick patter 
of hoofs behind us, and a lithe and bright Quadroon 
girl dashes by, sitting easily in the saddle of her 
pony, flashing a smile and a glance of her black eyes 
upon us, and then disappears under an arching bower 
of greenery. 

" A bird to the right sang ' follow, 5 
A bird to the left sang ' here.' " 

And the soft cooing of the ground dove accented the 
wind with a plaintive murmur. As we climbed higher 
and higher the landscape widened around us, and we 
could overlook the wide stretch of rolling hills. 
Somehow the scene recalled the mountains of Kerry, 
except for the tall crowns of the palm trees rising 
here and there. The configuration of the country 



158 . UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

was very similar, and the cabins on the hill-sides 
with their cane thatch, answered to the equally 
primitive dwelling's of the Irish peasantry. The light 
was sharper and brighter than that which broods 
softly over the green hills of Ireland, but on this day 
there were many chasing clouds that drifted past the 
sun and threw shadows across the hill-sides like those 
from an Irish sky. Singularly enough many of the 
localities bear Irish names, such as Cork Hill, and 
there is said to be a remnant of degraded mongrel 
whites living in one corner of the island, more bar- 
barous in their ways and manners than the negroes, 
who are the descendants of the wild Irish banished 
to the West Indies by Cromwell. It is even said that 
in their patois are to be found traces of the original 
Gaelic. In Barbadoes, where most of the Irish 
exiles were landed, they are equally degenerate and 
are known by the opprobrious title of " Red Legs." 
As we begin to descend the windward side the breeze 
freshens and blows with delightful vigor and cool- 
ness. We pass a police barrack and a little collec- 
tion of huts called the village of Harris, and descend 
to the borders of the sea. The difference between 
the windward and leeward sides of the West Indian 
islands is strikingly illustrated. On the leeward side 
the sea was flat and calm and only a long swell was 
lazily rolling up the beach under the cocoanut trees. 
Here on the same day the high-curved waves were 



MONTSERRAT. 159 

rolling in with tempestuous force, sending their white 
foam splashing up the rocks and along the sandy- 
beach. On the leeward side fishermen were paddling 
about to their pots or landing easily on the beach, 
while here the boats were drawn high up on the sand 
out of the reach of the waves, and landing would 
have been impossible for the most skillful boatman. 
It was the force of the trade wind, which blows 
steadily and strongly in one direction, so that in 
places exposed to its prevailing sweep the palms and 
other solitary trees are sensibly bent by its strength. 
The great leaves of the palms twisted and whirled 
under its power, and all the dark woods took new 
life with the breeze. As we commenced to climb the 
hills on the way, the poor old horse, which was 
attached to the only buggy for hire which Montser- 
rat can boast, gave out, and the passage home was 
made by walking up the ascents and sliding down 
the descents with a blind trust in providence and the 
breeching, while the driver worked his way by alter- 
nately leading the horse by the bridle and welting 
him with a big switch. Our plight moved the jeers 
of some women, who were mending the road by the 
primitive method of bringing earth from a neighbor- 
ing field in wooden platters on their heads to spread 
over the macadam, and one stout wench offered to 
lend us a goat. It was a tedious and sweltering 
journey, but it earned the supreme luxury of the West 



160 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

Indies, a bath in a rock reservoir, fed with a limpid 
living stream of most refreshing coolness. 

The evenings at Montserrat are not those of mad- 
dening excitement and dissipation. You can stroll 
through the narrow streets of the town, lit by infre- 
quent oil lamps, the object of the curiosity of the 
groups of women and children seated on the door 
steps, and of the men lounging on the corners, but 
there is no sign of animation except among the 
drinkers seen through the open doors of the bar 
rooms, who are jabbering under the influence of 
new rum. You can extend your walk to the wharf, 
where a few loungers are enjoying the sea breeze 
among the sugar hogsheads, and where some familiar 
wench, emboldened by the night, may salute you 
with a mocking " Good night, Buddy." Then you 
may turn and by the dark road under the hill come 
out upon the beach and follow it as long as you will, 
listening to the endless murmur of the sea, and 
looking for the ghost of a sail far off on the lucent 
horizon — or you may turn to the veranda and in the 
cool breeze endeavor to interpret the voices of the 
palms as they talk together in the silence. 

Between Montserrat and Nevis rises the singular 
and solitary rock of Redonda. It is bare and brown, 
with steeply precipitous sides and utterly devoid of 
vegetation. There is no harbor and apparently no 
way of landing except by steps cut in the rock. 



MONTSERRAT. 161 

Here and there on the precipitious sides is a cabin 
perched like the nest of a sea bird. A more desolate 
and forlorn place of residence could hardly be 
imagined, yet an English gentleman and his wife 
live there, where he is the manager of a phosphate 
mine. As we approach in the Tyne a flash of light 
is seen on the rock near the summit, and it is re- 
peated with quick and constant signallings. It is 
evidently a heliograph with which the manager is 
endeavoring to communicate with us for some pur- 
pose or other. Perhaps it is an urgent appeal for 
aid. Some accident may have happened on that 
solitary rock. The lady may be sick and the hus- 
band despairingly flashing his light for assistance. 
But no one on the Tyne knows anything of the 
meaning of heliograph signals, and she goes on her 
way leaving the bright points dancing in the sun so 
long as they can be seen. There is a recent tragedy 
connected with Eedonda, which saddens the thought 
in connection with the unheeded appeal. A young 
English gentleman, the only son of the owner of the 
mine, visited the island and in cruising about in one 
of the boats got soaking wet in a tropical shower, 
the hot sun brought on a fever, and when he landed 
in St. Kitts he was in a perilous condition. Symp- 
toms of yellow fever manifested themselves, and, 
after lingering a few days, he died. Within a few 
hours he was buried and the news flashed under the 

14* 



162 UNDER THE TRADE WINDS. 

sea to his parents. They could not have the con- 
solation of having- his body sent home, as he died of 
a pestilence, and a photograph of his grave, with the 
wreaths placed on it by kindly, if stranger, hands, is 
the only memorial they can have of his last resting 
place. Let us hope that no such tragedy is now 
happening on the solitary rock of Redonda as we 
steam away in the golden twilight. 



TO MES. WILLIAMS. 



A LOVER'S PAIN. 



I've thought if those dumb, heathen gods could breathe, 

As shapeless, strengthless, wooden things they stand, 
And feel the holy incense round them wreathe, 

And see before them offerings of the land ; 
And know that unto them is worship paid, 

From pure hearts kneeling on the verdant sod, 
Looking to helplessness for light and aid, 

Because by fate they know no higher God, 
How their dull hearts must ache with constant pain, 

And sense of shame and fear to be flung down, 
When all their weakness must one day be plain, 

And fire avenge the undeserved crown. 
And reading my love's letter, sad and sweet, I sigh, 

Knowing that such a helpless wooden God am I. 

Taunton, March, 1870. A. M. W. 



TO C. A. W. 



How oft have I in days forever gone 
Heard thy pure voice in some old simple song, 
With happy sadness and sweet grief prolong 
The dear complaint of some fond heart forlorn, 
That wept in music from grief's harp-striDgs drawn ; 
While all the joys that to free Miss belong 
Bloomed in thy radiant grace, a magic throng, 
And love enwrapped thee in its shining morn. 
But now, alas, those mournful strains of old 
Touch my sad heart with pains it cannot bear ; 
Their music breathes the anguish they enfold, 
And sorrow sings with each enchanted air, 
While gleams the vision of that face so fair, 
Those dear brown eyes, that hair of softened gold. 

A. M. W. 



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